Your work has helped to illuminate a crisis of unprecedented proportions that must be effectively addressed to avoid worldwide business and government service failures. In our testimony today, we would like to address three areas regarding the year 2000 crisis. Lastly, since the year 2000 project is so large and because of other factors, we must embrace the very real possibility that we will not finish the project, and we d like to discuss strategies that emerge from this realization. The Role of Large Information Processing Systems in Society Today and the Proliferation of the Year 2000 Problem. A common misperception, however, is the role these systems play in worldwide information processing, and their expected life spans.
Many people believe that mainframes are outdated and near the end of their useful life.
This leads to the belief that the year 2000 crisis might be significantly overstated since most older technology that is rife with the problem will be retired or replaced prior to experiencing failures. This is not the case. The fact is that large, mainframe systems remain at the heart of information technology processing for organizations both public and private worldwide. No, it doesn t, since only the hardware has been replaced, and that new hardware continues to run the same software still infected with the year 2000 virus. This is analogous to upgrading from a 386 to a Pentium PC, and then watching your favorite game run faster on the new machine.