Year 2000: Fiction, Fantasy, And Fact

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Term Paper Title	Year 2000: Fiction, Fantasy, And Fact
# of Words	3369
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	13.48

Year 2000: Fiction, Fantasy, and Fact

Year 2000: Fiction, Fantasy, and Fact

"The Mad Scramble for the Elusive Silver Bullet . . . and the Clock Ticks Away."

     Wayne Anderson
     November 7, 1996

     The year 2000 is practically around the corner, promising a new era of
greatness and wonder . . . as long as you don't own a computer or work with one.
The year 2000 is bringing a Pandora's Box of gifts to the computer world, and
the latch is slowly coming undone.
     The year 2000 bug is not really a "bug" or "virus," but is more a computer
industry mistake.  Many of the PC's, mainframes, and software out there are not
designed  or programmed to compute a future year ending in double zeros.  This
is going to be a costly "fix" for the industry to absorb.  In fact, Mike Elgan
who is the editor of Windows Magazine, says " . . . the problem could cost
businesses a total of $600 billion to remedy." (p. 1) The fallacy that
mainframes were the only machines to be affected was short lived as industry
realized that 60 to 80 million home and small business users doing math or
accounting etc. on Windows 3.1 or older software, are just as susceptible to
this "bug."  Can this be repaired in time?  For some, it is already too late.  A
system that is devised to cut an annual federal deficit to 0 by the year 2002 is
already in "hot water."  Data will become erroneous as the numbers "just don't
add up" anymore.  Some PC owners can upgrade their computer's BIOS (or complete
operating system) and upgrade the OS  (operating system) to Windows 95, this
will set them up for another 99 years.  Older software however, may very well
have to be replaced or at the very least, upgraded.
     The year 2000 has become a two-fold problem.  One is the inability of the
computer to adapt to the MM/DD/YY issue, while the second problem is the
reluctance to which we seem to be willing to address the impact it will have.
Most IS (information system) people are either unconcerned or unprepared.
     Let me give you a "short take" on the problem we all are facing.  To save
storage space -and perhaps reduce the amount of keystrokes necessary in order to
enter the year to date-most IS groups have allocated two digits to represent the
year.  For example, "1996" is stored as "96" in data files and "2000" will be
stored as "00."  These two-digit dates will be on millions of files used as
input for millions of applications.  This two digit date affects data
manipulation, primarily subtractions ...

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