Now our lives and well being are in danger from our own lack of foresight, for we have allowed the computer to usurp our thought and action processes. As time passes and more information becomes available, people are beginning to wake up to the alarming potential of a coming computer crisis. These terms refer to how the computer's internal clock interprets the date after the year 2000. Although conceptually this problem seems trivial, the sheer scope of finding and changing all the affected software and hardware is daunting. In software, billions and billions of lines of computer code must be searched to find the affected date fields.
Documentation regarding chip location, however, is often poor or nonexistent.
If you stop for a moment and think of all the information transferred regularly between data systems on a worldwide basis, you'll see that the ramifications are far-reaching. The complexities of the Y2K fix are multiplied by the many variables involved. For instance, there are approximately 500 computer languages. Most of these have to communicate with each other across networks. Any change to the software potentially affects that interaction.