Looks like the Fortune 20,000,000 (that's actually the number of small businesses the SBA guesses there are) is finally starting to get some attention...
I'm not sure if people understand that the vast majority of all small businesses don't use mainframes. Most use PCs, and 99% of all PC based code is not COBOL.
In the 80s many people started off using MS Basic. Then Borland's Turbo Pascal became the rage until dBase II and the whole xBase craze took over (Clipper, Foxpro, Clarion, Force, RBase, Paradox, etc.). Of course all the "heavy duty" programs were written in C, C++ and Assembler. Eventually Visual Basic became popular followed by the client/server based 4GLs like Powerbase. Let's also not forget the "codeless" tools, from InfoStar to FileMaker to Access. And we haven't even touched on the libraries you could buy to augment these languages!
Since most programs for PCs were done by consultants and small programming shops that have long disappeared, getting these customs jobs Y2K compliant is next to impossible. Even if you could track down the original programmer, that person would have to dig out the source code and the then current versions of the language, compiler, linker and libraries. In most cases, it ain't gonna happen, IMO.
So, as usual, like that "Inc" article pointed out, it will be the little guy that gets hit the hardest. It won't be pretty and there's nothing any of the mainframe-based Y2K companies we discuss on this thread can do to help.
- Jeff |
