June 29, 1998
Dear Elite Software Customer,
Thank you for using Elite Software products. As the next
century approaches, many organizations are reviewing their entire inventory
of software and assessing the impact on both their internally developed
and externally provided systems. A number of vendors have already developed
plans to analyze and begin implementing changes to support correct processing
of date fields after the turn of the century. 
We should start by asking, "What is special about the
year 2000?" The problem is that when your computer's clock hits midnight
on the last day of this century, some software will think the date is not
Jan. 1, 2000, but will instead think it is either Jan. 1, 1900 or Jan.
1, 1984.
The main problem with the year 2000 is in the way it is
stored and manipulated. Back in the early days of computers, it was a common
and, in many cases, even good programming practice to store the year as
a two digit number, where the two digits represented the year within the
century and that the first two digits were understood to be "19". This
could save large amounts of storage space for large databases. The problem
is that when the year becomes year 2000, most of the schemes to print the
date or calculate elapsed time fail, because the "00" year is taken to
be the year 1900 or 1984, depending on your computer and software.
All our products either don't use dates at all, or use
the full four digits to represent years. As a result of using this methodology,
Elite Software products will not be affected by any of the problems associated
with the Year 2000.
You can obtain a free program to verify that your PC will
correctly handle dates next century from NSTL.
They have also published some interesting background information about
the problem.
Bill Smith's magazine article on the Millennium Bug in
the July 6, 1998 issue of The News is here.
Y2K Links on the Internet
The
President's council on the Y2K problem has created a Web site at http://www.y2k.gov.
The
Year 2000 Information Center™ provides a forum for disseminating information
about the year 2000 problem, also called the Millennium Bug, and for the
discussion of possible solutions. http://www.year2000.com/y2k-main1.html
The
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. at http://www.fdic.gov/about/y2k
provides financial institution examinations. It also has information on
congressional testimony, federally approved software and links to other
federal bank regulators' Web sites.
Those
looking for insights into how to make investments based on Y2K strategies
should visit http://www.y2kinvestor.com.
The
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission site at http://www.sec.gov/news/home2000.htm
is also chock full of information on how publicly traded companies are
doing in fixing their Year 2000 problems. The site also has investor information
for the Year 2000 including questions for investors to ask.
The
National Institute of Standards and Technology at http://www.nist.gov/y2k
provides very useful consumer information including an article on "How
to Cope -- How the Average Citizen Should React to the Year 2000 Problem."
The
Internal Revenue Service at http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/prod/news/y2k/
has a list of frequently asked questions about the Year 2000 and provides
information on what it is doing to correct the problem.
The
Federal Communications Commission at http://www.fcc.gov/year2000/hometxt.html
serves as an information resource for communications and broadcasting companies
and their customers who are concerned about the problem.
Lots of general information on the Year 2000 phenomena is at Everything
2000
Mr. Smith welcomes your email about this article. - email
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Elite Software Development, Inc., webmaster@elitesoft.com
