The main presenters at the Texas Y2K Road Show were Dave Hall from the CARA Corporation and Don Estes from 2000 Technologies Corporation. I will cover Dave Hall's presentation in this article and Don Estes in separate reports because both men had some very interesting and important things to say about the year 2000. He pointed out that the problem lies at the very foundation of the logic of the way the computers were designed. The fact that computers were programmed with 2 digit date fields from the sixties in order to save memory is mentioned in most of the articles on the year 2000 problem, but most non-IT people still don't understand how 2 little digits can be such a big deal. At the risk of being redundant, I will offer one more explanation for your friends or business associates who still don't quite get it.
Computers do math.
They know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. I remember the very first IBM computer I ever worked with in college, the first thing to do was to load the stack of cards that would teach the computer how to do those four math processes. The year 2000 mistake is that we forgot to tell the computers that in certain circumstances, and for our own convenience, we want 00 to be larger than any number between 01 and 99. One way to fix it could be adding the code to tell the computer what to do when it gets a minus number in an age calculation. This has to be done every place where a time calculation is made.