Ah – the year 2000 problem? I’ve got just the thing you want right here, Marc Sokol, vice president of advanced technology at Computer Associates International Inc, told Washington lawmakers yesterday. And lo and behold, it ‘s a CA product. As the sands of time slip through our fingers there is no time left to fix this thing by hand, so automated software tools are the only answer, Sokol told a Congressional Committee hearing entitled Solving the Year 2000 Software Problem: Creating a Blueprint for Success. There’s too much software code to change and too few weekends to do it, he said: three years and 230 days, to be precise. Every date field must be located and fixed, which means for large enterprises hundreds of millions of lines of code, at an estimated cost of $0.30 to $0.50 per code to do it manually, according to Sokol. A quick calculation later reveals a frightening figure. And in true salesman fashion the CA solution will cost just a fraction of that, and to prove it works, we’ve tried it on ourselves! CA claims to have analyzed and updated millions of lines of its own code. The product is CA Discovery 2000 Solution.
