The press talks about the billions of lines of computer program code that must be Y2K remediated. This is true, there are billions of lines of code involved. What the press means is that there are billions of lines of code that must be scanned to determine whether date processing is involved. Much of the code that needs to be remediated involves printed reports. The change needed to many of these reports is to expand the year date field on the report header.
Technology comes to the rescue.
The author, Paul Ehrlich, predicted worldwide famine and major wars by 2000 due to the effects of overpopulation. While there is overpopulation in some areas and there unfortunately is famine in the world at this time, they are not the major problems that Ehrlich well-meaningly predicted. He had not taken into account the continued introduction of new technologies to increase food production and worker productivity. He also did not envision the substantial reduction in the rate of conception that has occurred. There has been the rapid introduction of Y2K diagnostic, analysis and conversion software from companies such as ViaSoft, Peritus, MicroFocus and many others.