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NEW MILLENNIUM: THE YEAR 2000 PROBLEM

Most software developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (and some in the 1990s) was not engineered to be operable in the 21st Century. "Why this happened" is easy to understand: memory, disk space, and cycle time were scarce - performance was prized more than robustness. "What was done" is easy to understand - we used two digits to represent the year. "What needs to be done" is easy to understand - change everything to a four digit field. (Other related problems may arise because of the use of base years and leap year calculations.) But the size of the problem is enormous. The US Department of Defense alone estimates that their inventory of thousands of systems and hundreds of millions of lines of computer code needs to be examined and fixed. In a study performed by Mitre for DDR&E, the team analyzed over 5.4 millions lines of code and found that per system, an average of 1.16% of the code was affected by the Year 2000 problem. The estimated effort to find the affected code an! d to fix the problem ranged from $0.75 per line-of-code in an automated information system to $8.52 for command and control systems. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) estimates that the cost of fixing the Y2K problem will be $300 billion to $600 billion world wide.

The problem is more of a management problem than a technical one. Every line of code needs to be examined, changes made and tested. To make matters worse few are owning the problem. Although there are tools on the marketplace to assist in the task, there is no silver bullet to finding, fixing, and testing the changes. Software tools will assist in locating the suspected problems, but an analyst is needed to determine if a change is required and to make the fix. Commercial tools are available for the popular languages, such as Cobol, but tools are needed for many of the DoD systems written in less popular languages, such as Jovial and assemblers.

The problem may arise in applications, databases, job control language; in systems software and commercial off-the-shelf packages. Payroll systems may incorrectly process paychecks. Our electronic banking system may be in disarray. Our military and emergency systems may become inoperable. As stated by Emmett Paige, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense at a government oversight committee on 16 April 1996, "Inaction is simply unacceptable; coordinated and collaborative action is imperative... This problem needs to be worked immediately." "You cannot underestimate the seriousness of the problem," says Kathleen Adams of the Social Security Administration and chairwoman of the Federal Government's Year 2000 Interagency Committee. "The government is so large and has so many billions of lines of code. Locating and correcting all the date references within such a short time frame will be expensive and yet it must be done."

  • LITERATURE Articles, papers, reports, etc. on the Year 2000 problem, including citations and abstracts from the DACS Software Engineering Bibliographic Database.
  • PEOPLE, PROGRAMS, AND ORGANIZATIONS This page contains People, Programs and Organizations, which includes User Groups and Technical Societies - sites of organizations that concentrate on the Year 2000 issues; and News Sources - primarily Internet communication capabilities.
  • RELATED SITES Web sites related to the New Millennium and the computing problems that accompany it. Not all sites which contain information on the Y2K problem are referenced here - only those that are content rich and/or provide unique insight into the potential millennium crisis are included.
  • SOFTWARE TOOLS The tool references include both Tool and Service Vendor Lists - pointers to WWW sites for organizations that provide Year 2000 services and or software tools; and Y2K Readiness Products - which contains lists of systems that are Year 2000 compliant.

    YEAR 2000 PROBLEM REPORTS

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