How Vast Is the Problem?

Just as today's railroad uses a rail standard derived from the width of a Roman chariot, modern computer systems inherit their default conventions from the mainframe era, when it was common practice to encode the year as a two-digit field. After all, workstations and personal computers were initially built to augment mainframe systems and use their data. The Y2K problem is exceptionally widespread. It affects hardware (BIOS, real-time clocks), embedded firmware, languages and compilers, operating systems, random number generators and security services, database-management systems, transaction-processing systems, electronic data interchange and banking systems, spreadsheets, PBXs (private branch exchanges), telephone systems, and more. The Y2K problem is not merely an information systems (IS) problem. Although the majority of Y2K problems are located in ISs, the sad truth is that systems anywhere that use dates may be threatened. It is naive to assume that new applications and systems ...  more