Many applications used only two date characters in order to save expensive memory and reduce the number of keystrokes needed to enter data. This inevitably led to an inability to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. Other problems occur because 00 is often used for missing data and 99 is used for defaults. As a result, date calculations are incorrect and sorting routines put 2000 ahead of 1999. The university depends on millions of lines of code often written by long retired people and coded in obsolete versions of programming languages.
Embedded processors are difficult to test and expensive to replace.
Most importantly the whole process is highly technical, involves everyone, has an absolute deadline, and has no immediate payoff to the units. This is exacerbated if the demand on the manufacturers or suppliers to fix the problem competes with millions of others who have also not taken actions to minimize the problem. All this presents the university with the most difficult kind of priority to deal with. The committee consists of John Hutchinson chair, Peter Zoller, Gary Ott, Mary Herrin, Jim Rogers, Lori Reesor, Brad Beets, Darlene Bailey, Klent Harkness, and John Ellis. The first step in this process is to assemble an inventory of hardware and software that have date dependent functions.