Older systems, written in older programming languages and generally harder to maintain, will require significant assessment, rewriting and testing. Significant future problems with the Municipal Court, Payroll and Property Tax systems have already been identified. ISD expects to have these mainframe products operating in a test environment during January 1998. Critical City data is no longer stored and processed solely on the mainframe. However the flexibility provided by these desktop tools allows files to be created containing dates that are not immediately recognizable as dates.
Alphanumeric fields can contain a year as readily as a date format field.
These obscure date fields may or may not be able to accommodate the Year 2000. Personal computer hardware represents still another challenge as we head toward the Year 2000. PC's that are more than a few years old may not be able to change the internal system date accurately when 2000 is reached. Although DOS is expected to handle the year 2000 correctly and most PC's can be corrected by simply using the Windows control panel to reset the date, problems are expected with older CMOS RTC chips and some BIOS chips that cannot make the century change. Newer BIOS chips will pass the correct date to DOS, however software that uses the RTC date may still not function.