The "Y2K Problem" has been gaining increasing attention from government agencies, the private sector, and the media as we approach the last day of the century. Depending upon your source of information, the Year 2000 date rollover on electronic devices might either be the "end of the world" as professed by Nostradamus, or just a minor annoyance.The problem? When the calendar on your computer reaches the year 2000, any programs you installed on it that deal with dates, may malfunction or fail altogether, if they do not include a provision for the TWO DIGIT form of date, like 10/21/98 (which in the year 2000, the month of October and the 21st day, will be 10/21/00). In some software, dates with '00' in them for the year, may mistake the date for the year 1900. In others, they may not be able to store a '00' at all, as it may seem like a non-existent number.
And this may lead to a literal BREAKDOWN on your computer, and on a lot of computers everywhere.
In reality, the solution to the Y2K problem is probably somewhere in-between the two viewpoints: catastrophe or minor nuisance. Any solution does, however, require that information management personnel at all levels within the Army gain an understanding of the tasks facing them and work together to maximize the efficiency of our solution.
Computer Sales & Service has, for the past few years, been certifying its hardware and software to be FREE from any problems with the Y2K 'Bug'.And, we can provide consultative services to You, for your existing non-CSS systems, while certifying that you will not experience any problems with our systems which you purchase. Our Software Experts can analyze and correct your Cobol, ADA, PL/1, Lisp, Algol, Fortran, DBMS, Basic, Assembler, DB2, Informix, or any other software with Y2K anomalies in them, at a very cost effective price.
The process:
- Analyze Present Systems
- Prepare a Site Y2K Impact Study
- Propose hardware and software solutions
- Customer Decision
- Design Final Implementation Plan
- Implement
- Test
- Correct
- Sign off
Return to Home Page
A Y2K Project Officer's Update (13 April, 1998) -- from the Department of the Army:
I recently had the opportunity to attend a commercial contracting conference in one of the local southwest states. The contractors who had booths set up in the vendor area represented a fairly wide range of public and commercial construction contracting organizations--from building construction to electrical, water, air conditioning, etc... In a very "unscientific" survey, I walked around the vendor hall and queried a number of the contracting companies and even some state regulatory officials about their knowledge of "Y2K."
As you can imagine, more often than not, I received a blank stare when I asked about the Y2K problem and what their companies did to ensure that elevators, environmental systems, hospital equipment, etc. was Y2K "compliant." One of the officials from the state's regulatory board informed me that there was NO state requirement that specifically dictated that a contractor had to make a "best effort" to verify if any computer-based systems met a Y2K compliance certification. As I have stated before, "Let the buyer beware!"
On another note, my personal view of the Y2K issue is that the battleground is moving from a technical to a political issue. As the set of programming tools for correcting Y2K errors in code continues to mature and as organizations start to bring their fleets of automation hardware into compliance, I'm starting to see skirmishes between organizations (government, private, commercial, etc.) over exactly who is at fault if two systems don't exchange data correctly. These arguments can quickly degenerate into a finger-pointing exercise over who should take the blame when two or more systems don't communicate correctly because their respective programmers have different viewpoints over what Y2K compliance is.
CSS CAN PREVENT YOUR WORST FEARS FROM BEING REALIZED. Call our Y2K department:
888-ASK-CSS1.