Embedded Systems - The Real Year 2000 Problem

By David M. Nadler

The Year 2000 problem, or "millennium bug," has received widespread media attention over the past several years, prompting even the most lackadaisical of corporations to launch Year 2000 renovation efforts to repair, replace, or upgrade their critical business systems. Despite the widespread awareness, one of the most challenging and critical manifestations of the problem frequently has been overlooked, understated, and underestimated -- the embedded systems problem. Embedded systems are a potential Achilles heel, and widespread failure of these crucial systems threatens to cause sever financial harm to many industrial companies.

The Year 2000 Problem can be traced to the early days of computing, when memory and data storage were very expensive. To conserve these limited resources, computer programmers used just two digits in date fields to identify calendar years. In the year 2000 many computer programs will recognize the year "00" as 1900, causing