ions. This high cost comes bothin the complex nature of the programs and the man-hours requireddeveloping these solutions. High implementation cost. Unless over alarge scale, the research and development expense will be recouped atthe time of sale.In House / External Re-engineering:This is the solution being implemented in corporations with large ITsections and has some plan in place. Through re-engineering theirexisting source code they can develop applications that support the 2000format. At the same time new features can be added and the source can berecompiled to work under improved hardware. Like any other approach, ithas its benefits and pitfalls. This approach makes use of existingsource code, and where compilers are available and supported it can makein-house expertise with that source code. Source conversion products forseveral mainframe languages such as COBOL and Assembler are becomingavailable. While these are part of the solution, a lot of codemanipulation is still required to make the product work as expected.While such programs can handle programs that get the date from theoperating system, they cannot handle areas where the date is an integralpart of a numerical algorithm. This problem still requires analyzing thecode by hand and often requires less external assistance and support,leading to a much cheaper solution for companies. This solution requiresa significant amount of planning in advance and is often not practicalfor many ventures that haven't begun their 2000 conversions.Software patchingSome hardware systems are the problem in that the date they provide fromthe hardware will not be functional after the year 2000, or before. IBMhas announced such patches for its S390 processor machines running VMS5.1 or later. Intel based personal computers that do not support the2000 format in their BIOS will have a real problem in that they willrequire a DATE command to be entered very time the machine is turned on!This is not...
