MB, >>>I know that there are also hardware problems with Y2K, but they are in few systems and most can be overcome without tossing out the entire box. If you look at Motorola's budget for Y2K, which hit the news today, there is almost nothing allocated to hardware purchases. Internal costs are 70% of their spending, outside software vendors and consultants/bodies nearly 30%. I think that will be the type of thing we will see for most large cos., not new system buys on a massive scale.<<<
You are right in so far as what the media is covering concerning the Y2K problem. It is 99% software related - very little if any is hardware related.
There is an estimate (from the Gartner Consulting Group) that the immediate Y2K problem involves around 600-800 billion lines of computer code. Seventy percent of that is written in Cobol - most of the others are in Fortran, Aseembler, PL1. Very little of it is in the modern languages - C, C++, Basic, Java et al.
The remediation just to prevent system crashes is estimated at $1 per LOC. Unfortunately, after spending the money on consultants in fixing the 420-560 billions LOC that is written in Cobol what you have left are programs that will work in the year 2000 that was orginally designed for IBM Systems 360, 370, 8100, NCR 8500, HP3000, VAX's, UNYSIS, WANG, PRIME, Burroughs, Amdahl, Fujitsu, Siemans, Nixdorfs, and others.
These are or were terrific systems - but most have discontinued production and not many people are trained to maintain these older systems. Further, they are characterized by what they are lacking. They lack the GUI, ICONS, Mice, Pull Down Menus, and the color that most of your people have come to know as computing. Most of these systems are still character based. Just in order to use many of these systems, Users have to be specially trained to learn the codes and other conventions that were setup to start these systems. Most of the stuff was not intuitively obvious.
As you can see, (perhaps), these may initially be characterized as a software problem, but they will very quikcly become a hardware problem - perhaps not immediately - but over time.
Sincerely,
Mary
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