e of years, depending on the size of your businessand the availability of resources. And those resources, whether in-houseor outside services, will become increasingly scarce as time runs out:"We're telling people to book their services by the second half of 1996at the latest,"-- Bruce Hall, IT Expert, January 1996 Datamation MagazineEstimated man hour replacement costs for a large corporationComments Lines of Code Estimated Man HoursManufacturing System 1,200,000 2,000COTS Software Provider 8,800,000 116,300Commercial Software 2,000,000 2,5002,000 Programs 7,000,000 38,000Retail System 1,300,000 9,000401k Plan System 12,000,000 200,000Totals: 39,800,000 442,800--Source: "The Millennium Mess" by CACI IncorporatedList of ProblemsSeveral machines have already started to exhibit millennium bug. TheUnisys 2000, ironically named, uses a signed integer to represent the8th bit of the year field, meaning that it failed on the first day of1996. Several credit card systems have problems that cause cards enteredwith a year of 00 to be designated as invalid. Some insurance companiescannot sell 5-year annuities because their systems will not accept dateentries past 1999.Hardware system problems have not gotten a lot of attention in relationto the year 2000 problem, and their is little in the way of resourcesavailable to determine if any particular system will be venerable to themillennium problem at a hardware level.There is another aspect of the year 2000 problem as well: Convincing ITmanagers that they need to act in advance. There is a prevailing theorythat a "magic bullet" will appear to resolve the problems. Allindicators do not point in this direction. This problem is compounded bythe lack of professional resources available to deal with and repair theproblem. Analysts estimate that resources should have been allocated inmost mid to large-size companies by the end of 1996. This point haspassed and still most companies have not acted.Part of th...
