And that's what Healy did until his sister-in-law came back from Florida with the story about her driver's license. Coventry's business software was 14 years old. The operating system running it was six or seven versions out of date. And the box itself was a 286. None of the pieces could even begin to deal with anything after December 31, 1999.
As soon as Healy saw those question marks on his monitor, he knew what he had to do: call the consultant. Much to his relief he found that his old pal was up on the issue and had been working to make the business software Y2K compliant. Because the cost of the consultant's labor was spread over a number of customers--two dozen other businesses use a base version of the program--Healy estimates he paid only about $8,000 for the upgrade. Unfortunately the updated software wouldn't run on Healy's geriatric machines. So about a year ago, after a brief period of denial, out went the 286 and Xenix and in came an Acer 486 and the latest version of SCO Unix. Total cost for the hardware and the operating system: $9,000.
Healy transferred his data from the old program, including detailed information on some 500 customers, to the new one--a relatively easy task. But his original version was so highly customized that getting its successor to perform in the same way has been not just a struggle but a drain on the business. "Having to pay attention to the new stuff is adding another 10 hours a week that I'm paying attention to computers and not my business," he says. "While I'm playing with computers, my competitor is using a pencil to serve my customers."
Despite the almost daily glitches, Healy considered his business-software problem largely solved. But a seemingly tougher nut remained uncracked. In 1989 Healy became the editor and publisher of Vintage Bike--a 40-page black-and-white magazine about old motorcycles and the people who love them. He bought the magazine, which had been started in 1978 by a racing enthusiast in Atlanta--for $10,000 in cash and $20,000 in assumed debt. The package included subscription-management software, a database of subscribers' names, and an IBM PC "so old you could put it in a museum," says Healy. The magazine, which comes out quarterly and accounts for about 14% of Healy's revenues, runs paid advertising and costs $18.50 for an annual subscription. The subscriber database has grown to 12,000 names--both dealers and consumers--about 3,000 of them active.
The Vintage Bike database proved even less hospitable to the year 2000 than Healy's other systems: plug in 00, and it won't even let you try to calculate anything.
But unlike his beloved business software, this program cried out for change: Healy wanted to add things to it, like the ability to handle bulk mailings. Unfortunately the program was incomprehensible as written. The developer, who had created it for the magazine's original owner, had structured the database and devised the field names in anti-intuitive, idiosyncratic ways. (So, for example, instead of Name.Cust and Address.Cust, the descriptors read MC005 and TS137.) "It's common for a programmer to make himself indispensable by writing code that only he can decipher," says Healy. "It's like: 'You can't fire me. I've got the secret-decoder ring."
Healy wanted that ring, so he set out to track down the original developer, who he knew was also a motorcycle buff. After several months of asking friends and friends of friends (in the biker community, there are only two or three degrees of separation between any two people), he finally located the guy, who was running a tour business for motorcyclists in Phoenix. "I called him and asked, 'Do you want to rewrite this software?" says Healy. "And he said, 'No, I'm out of the thing completely. I don't want anything to do with it."
The developer did agree to send Healy the source code, however, in exchange for a small fee and some free advertising in Vintage Bike. When the code arrived, housed on an ancient five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy, Healy sat down and tried to make sense of it, having taught himself QuickBASIC, the language the program was written in, for the occasion. After investing 50 or 60 hours in the project, however, he was no closer to cracking the thing. "It's written in hieroglyphics," says Healy. "You might as well try to read the writing on an Egyptian tomb."
With year 2000 anxiety pressing him to work quickly, Healy concluded that his only choice--aside from rekeying all 12,000 names into another program--was to hand over the source code and database to a consultant who specializes in such things. The consultant that he selected, Hank Portier of Data Recovery Inc., in Needham, Mass., came back with news, both bad and good. The bad news: the code was copyrighted, and neither consultant nor client could touch it without getting permission from the original developer and possibly forking over a sizable fee. The good news: Portier could convert Healy's files into a format readable by current relational-database programs without recoding. The cost for Portier's labor--most of it spent combing through Healy's voluminous records and substituting four-digit years for two-digit ones in every date--would run about $2,000.
Healy hasn't yet decided whether he'll pay Portier to do the conversion or try it himself "in the winter, when things slow down." He's also still debating which database program to buy and even which platform to run it on. The cost for everything--new hardware, operating system, database software, and conversion--will probably exceed $20,000, Healy estimates. "Reality," he says, "has always taxed our computer budget."
Even after the subscriber database is safely reborn, Healy still won't be entirely free of the forest. "We've got lots of teeny pieces of software--all those little add-ons that you buy," he says. "I'm not even going to test those. I just don't use them that much." Coventry also has three Macs, used primarily to produce Vintage Bike. "Everybody says that Macs are bulletproof," says Healy. "But who knows about the software?" And what about Healy's suppliers? After all, if their systems aren't up to snuff, he may never get the parts he orders. And his customers? They won't be replenishing their inventory if crashing systems send their own businesses into a tizzy.
Healy looks slightly aggrieved at the questions. "I don't know what they're doing," he says. "I've got enough things to worry about."
Leigh Buchanan is the editor of Inc. Technology.
