Scope of the Y2K Problems

The scope of this problem is immense. The awareness and information available on this problem is growing rapidly, as an observation of the rate at which the amount of information available on the Internet has been growing. An advanced search of "year AND 2000 AND problem" through the infoseek index yielded more than half a million pages!

Even this volume of information does not sufficiently judge the magnitude of the problem. Early IBM-PC machines and compatibles will be rendered useless for date applications without running software patches as the system clocks on the hardware level will not handle the four-letter date format.

This problem is not only limited to personal computers and mainframes, however. Most electronic devices that make use of dates will have serious unpredictable problems. The micro controllers that are in car ignition control systems, clocks, microwaves, and even nuclear weapons all suffer from the same problem. The unpredictable effects come from both the microprocessor sed in the device and the compiler or linker used to generate the code;

As any programmer knows, when software is given an input that it does not expect, anything can happen. Anything ranging from an error message to a serious program crash. The material effects of these could be anything from your BIOS preventing your computer from booting to your car not starting the morning after your millennium party.

Strange effects have already begun to occur with many programs on the PC platform not understanding the 2000 year field, or when it is entered, defaulting to 00 or 1900. This is of particular concern with widespread versions of home database and spreadsheet software becoming obsolete unless patches are released to fix this behaviour. For many companies, however, the attitude has been to make a complete upgrade of the software necessary - hardly an ideal solution for the home user.

"According to a variety of experts, it will take, on average, 6 months to do an impact analysis of the systems before beginning another three to six months worth of pilot projects. Then, production itself could easily take a couple of years, depending on the size of your business and the availability of resources. And those resources, whether in-house or outside services, will become increasingly scarce as time runs out: We're telling people to book their services by the second half of 1996 at the latest."

-- Bruce Hall, IT Expert, January 1996 Datamation Magazine

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