The year 2000 problem could have been completely prevented had some early people envisioned the degree to which the microprocessor would Surely, no one would have thought that in the earlydays of ENIAC that everything from your alarm clock to your car would becomputerized. Even the IT managers of the 80's could not be blamed: Thedisk space savings from dropping the two digits of the date over 100Million Records would represent almost 200 Megabytes! Space requirementsaside, overhead on search times and disk loading/access are also added.Surely one could have designed a system whereby the program would beaware of the century, regardless of the data records used. Hindsight isalways 20/20 however, and this was almost never the case.Regardless where you address the problem from, the year 2000 problem isa huge, expensive and international one. In many cases it is a problemlined with doubt as to it's effects. This paper will analyze the variousaspects to the year 2000 problem, classical and software solutions tothe problem, and present the author's ideas on how a systematic approachto the "millennia virus" can prevent doomsday from becoming a realityfor many information technology managers and their corporations.What, specifically, is this "millennia virus" to begin with? There hasbeen much talk about it, and most people know it has something to dowith the date formats and how the computer processes them. How it isaffecting that processing is what the key to implementing a solution is.There are several forms the "bug" will metamorphose into. For example: Field / Date Processing Time based calculations Hardware failure"Will all be affected by the problem? "OLD will seem YOUNG, a FEWmoments will seem like an ENTIRE century, FUTURE events will haveALREADY occurred."-- Duncan G. Connall; Global Software, Inc.Scope of ProblemsThe scope of this problem is immense. The awareness and informationavailable on this problem is growing rapidly, ...
