Somebody sent this summary to me about Y2K. It isn't a pretty picture.
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| The Social Security Administration has 30,000,000 lines of code to fix.
| Four hundred programmers have been working on the problem since 1991, and
| had only fixed six million lines after five years of effort. The
Washington
| Post
|
| The total cost of fixing the Y2K problem will be between $300 billion and
| $600 billion worldwide. The Gartner Group
|
| The total cost of Y2K repairs for the U.S. government is estimated to be
| $3.9 billion. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who also warned the
| estimate might be 90% too low
|
| Worldwide economic damage of Y2K will reach $119 billion. When adding the
| cost of lawsuits, the total cost could be well over $1 trillion. Business
| Week
|
| The FAA has forty vintage IBM model 3083 mainframes. None are compliant
and
| they cannot be made compliant because the people who designed them are
| either dead or retired. Announcement by IBM, the maker of the computers
| (the FAA says they can still make it? bizarre?)
|
| Up to 70% of businesses in Asia will fail outright or experience severe
| hardship. Phillip Dodd, a Unisys Y2K expert, as quoted in the Bangkok
Post
|
| The potential for a deep global recession in 2000 is 70%. Dr. Edward
| Yardini, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell
|
| General Motors has over 100,000 suppliers worldwide, any one of which can
| bring their assembly line to a halt.
|
| 70% of Chief Information Officers of corporations in America believe
their
| companies will not be compliant in time.
|
| The IRS has over 80,000,000 lines of computer code, running in 88,000
| programs on 80 mainframe computers. By the end of 1997, they had fixed
| 2,000 programs, leaving 86,000 to go. The Washington Post
|
| The United States, with over half of all computer capacity and 60% of
| Internet assets, is the world's most technology-dependent country. -- GAO
| report, Sep 3, 1998
|
| Finding and fixing all the Y2K-affected software will require over
700,000
| person-years. Capers Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a
firm
| that tracks programmer productivity
|
| Over a billion embedded chips exist worldwide. An estimated 1% are
| susceptible to the Y2K bug. Unfortunately, many critical chips are in
| deep-sea drilling rigs, satellites, or other impossible-to-reach
platforms.
|
| Most cars built since 1990 contain over 20 microprocessors.
|
| With just over 500 days left before the new millennium, only 15% of
| companies and government agencies expect to have their critical systems
| more than three-quarters tested and compliant for year 2000 by Jan. 1,
| 1999, according to a study released today by IT services firm Cap Gemini
| America. Information Week, August 1998
|
| Only 11% of companies in the United States have begun looking at
| noncompliant chips (embedded systems). Gartner Group research report
|
| Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, Japan, most of
| South America, most of the Middle East and central Africa all lag the
| United States by more than 12 months in their Y2K repairs Gartner Group
| analyst Lou Marcoccio in his Y2K status report
|
| 47% of U.S. companies have no answer to the question, 'What will happen
| when your embedded systems fail?' Gartner Group research report
|
| As of September 1998, only 23% of U.S. companies had evaluated the effect
| of Y2K on their supply chain (the interdependency factor?) Gartner Group
| research report
|
| 180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened worldwide.
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