Mr. Rossetti went on to say he is confident that these problems will not occur because IRS computer experts will prevent them. Many federal agencies will not be able to renovate and fully test all of their mission-critical systems and may face major disruptions in their operations. No one knows what will happen as we approach the year 2000. We do know that many manufacturing processes are dependent upon computers, especially in the chemical process industries. Even the nation's defense apparatus could be adversely affected.
Computers exchange information among themselves.
Computer languages do not store and use dates in a consistent way. Dates are labeled, stored, and used in different ways from program to program and even within a single program. Therefore, identifying and correcting dates requires close inspection of the computer code line by line. Most large corporations and government agencies use thousands of programs containing millions of lines of computer code. Each line of code must be inspected manually and, if necessary, fixed.