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Alex Lo

Hong Kong emerged glitch-free yesterday from 'four nines day', the first round of Y2K challenges to confront the world.

 But the Government and computer experts warned people not to drop their guard on December 31, when they fear real trouble could hit.

 Deputy Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting Jessie Ting Yip Yin-mei said the government centre monitoring possible problems had received no reports of incidents.

 The MTR was also trouble-free and said train services would not be suspended temporarily during the rollover to 2000.

 The KCR will stop trains a minute either side of midnight as a precautionary measure.

  MTR traffic operations manager Eric Hui Yip-hung said: 'Based on the results from our intensive testing and all simulated exercise, there is no need to suspend or partially suspend our train services during the millennium rollover.'  Cash machines functioned normally yesterday and there was no chaos reported by land, sea or air traffic.

 'Experiences gathered today will increase our confidence in tackling the coming challenges, but at the same time we will not be complacent,' Mrs Ting said.

 She urged small and medium-sized companies to step up their defences for December 31 and said the Government would offer every assistance.

 Fears about a September 9 glitch arose because some old programming languages used the sequence '9999' as a shorthand to denote 'end of file' or 'stop processing', according to Roy Ko Wai-tak, information technology consultant of the Hong Kong Productivity Council.

 A computer mistaking the date September 9 for a command could have crashed.

 The Hong Kong Productivity Council and Hong Kong Computer Society both warned that the Y2K bug on December 31 posed much more serious problems.

 An Airport Authority spokesman said 124 systems, including baggage handling and access control, deemed as Y2K sensitive had been upgraded. No incidents were reported yesterday.

 The Hospital Authority also said its systems were working well after testing 18,000 pieces of equipment.

 The banking industry was unaffected, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said.

 It said it had been monitoring the situation since 6pm on Wednesday and would continue the exercise round the clock until reports had been completed and assessed.



Carefree '9999' gives chance to iron out bugs