Steve Chin wrote: >Hi, all. I have a requirement from one of our customers to provide Year >2000 Compliance for our products. It is my belief (which is probably >wrong) that this is in reference to computer equipment and software which >is intended for use on IBM-compatible computers running DOS, Windows >(3.1, 95, NT). What other details can anyone help me with? Someone please >correct me if I'm wrong.
>Steve Chin >Compliance Engineer >StreamLogic Corp. >Menlo Park, CA, USA >[email protected] >(415) 833-4505 Here is some information on "The Year 2000 Computer Crisis" which may or may not apply in your case, but which you will probably find interesting in any case. Gabriel Roy Hughes Network Systems MD (56) "The Year 2000 computer crisis poses one of the single most momentous challenges ever faced by the Information Technology and Engineering organizations and will have enormous impacts on both corporate hardware and software platforms. Frightening articles about the year 2000 computer crisis are reported daily: some reports say costs incurred worldwide could exceed $600 billion; the Gartner Group expects less than 50% of companies will achieve full year 2000 compliance by December 31, 1999; other reports state that only about 10% of the businesses have begun to address the issues. So what is the problem? The problem is simple: many computer applications developed over the last 35 years used a typical six character field to store dates. The "typical" formats being: DDMMYY, MMDDYY, or YYMMDD where DD = Day, MM = Month, and YY = Year. None of these formats allowed for the two character century value of "19". Now as the century turns from the 20th to 21st those applications will be unable to distinguish dates between centuries. How did it happen? In the late 1950s and early '60s, the omission of the "19" was viewed as a method of saving memory and storage space in a time when their cost were very expensive. For instance, in the mid-'60s an 8 kilobyte mainframe memory upgrade cost approximately $1 million. Today, an 8-megabyte upgrade or about 1,000 times that of the 8 kilobyte upgrade, costs about $40 dollars. Disk storage was nearly 4,000 times the cost of today's not to mention the time required for the century value of "19" to be keypunched and stored for processing. Furthermore, no one expected the programs to last more than 10 years much less to the turn of the century. Now with the century quickly approaching, most "older" programs (now being called legacy systems), will not be able to function properly. I still don't understand! Give me some examples! Using the standard six character/digit date format let's do an Age calculation. Let's assume you were born on February 3rd, 1976. Your birth date would be stored as 020376. Subtracting the two digit year(76), the year you were born, from today's two digit year of 97 your age is calculated as 21. Now let's turn the century and use February 3rd, 2000 as today's date. Using the same six digit date calculation, the computer application subtracts 76 from 00 and your age is calculated as 76. What do your think that will do to the pension plan, your drivers licenses, or your life insurance premium rate? Let's try another example: Imagine you owe $15 on your credit card on December 15, 1999, at 18% compounded interest rate. In January, 2000 you receive next month's bill, just one month later, and you now owe $80 million. What went wrong? The year 99 was subtracted from 00 and as a result it calculated your interest for 99 years. One more: You called a friend at 11:50 p.m. on New Year's Eve to wish them a Happy New Year and talk for about 20 minutes. In January 2000 you get a telephone bill for a call that lasted 99 years. In other words any application which compares dates across centuries will result in the following: [ In the best case scenario, the system or application will just fail, causing downtime until the application can be fixed. [ In the worst case, the system and/or application will continue processing, producing incorrect results. It is true that many of these examples seem quite trivial and easily dealt with. If you get overcharged for a telephone call that lasted for 99 years or have an error on your bank statement, you will simply have to call and have the obvious error corrected. That is only normal for any error situation but will the turn of the century be normal? You may become one of thousands - even millions - of people trying to get this "simple" error corrected. Today there is almost no aspect of life not dependent on computers. Everything from such obvious areas of financial systems, insurance and risk management, to almost all manufacturing, engineering, wholesale and retail business to the entire communications system and almost every government program. The National Bulletin Board for Year 2000 has estimated that: 90% of all legacy program are date sensitive and need to be modified before the year 2000, making it the biggest challenge ever faced by the industry. Additionally it states that "Modifying these programs while continuing to support the present business activities is like changing the engine of a 747 while in flight."
