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To: Snowshoe who wrote (1498)7/15/1997 11:11:00 AM
From: Allen Benn   of 10309
 
>Embedded Systems Y2K Problems? I assume this is more of a problem
>with "in-house proprietary" systems, and that it will hasten the trend
>toward COTS technology by the end of the century. Any thoughts?

I agree with you that in-house OSs might be prone to the Millennium Bug because inventive programmers may well have slipped all sorts of ingenious date tricks into the code - mainly because they always find themselves squeezed by limited available resources. I also agree that even the possibility of deeply embedded Millennium bugs should spur on conversion to commercial RTOS. I suspect all the RTOS vendors will make statements certifying their software as bug-free, as INTS already did recently.

Of course, no matter what the condition of the OS and supporting libraries, the applications programmer can insist on doing something dumb with dates. For example, Oracle has never had a Millennium problem with the database, but their client-side application development software needed sprucing up - requiring most customers to upgrade the client side to avoid a Millennium effect.

The fact that file-maintenance-type COBOL is not commonly found in embedded systems, if ever, tells me that I would not expect major difficulty fixing embedded application code. I believe the difficult-to-fix Millennium Bug really boils down to organically evolving COBOL systems that live and breathe intermediate files with restricted date formats that must be sorted and merged between each operation cycle.

However, even if a bug is easy to fix, there remains the fear that it pops up in previously deployed devices still in service at the turn of the Century, like little time bombs.

Allen
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