The alternative to addressing the year 2000 will be going out of business.

We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of this confrontation seems to add to people’s denial of it. They know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry about it until then.

It's a global problem. If we have our own house in order, that will still not matter if our neighboring countries have not theirs in order… It takes too long for people to really understand we really have a problem.

The year 2000 date-change project presents organizations with one of the most interesting challenges since the dawn of the computer age. It is potentially the largest project the IS department has ever attempted. It has life-threatening implications for the business. It has an absolute, immovable deadline. It is a significant, unplanned, out-of-budget expense and it has no sponsor.

Mainframers are in serious denial these days about what will happen a couple of seconds after midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, when many thousands of mainframe programs handling critical business applications discover they don't know how to deal with dates that include the year 2000.

It's not that the world's COBOL programmers don't know how to fix the problem, or that current mainframe programming languages are incapable of handling dates in the next century. The problem is that mountain of old, fragile mainframe code still in use in business around the world - often running processes that lie right at the heart of a company's business.

These applications have been around so long, were developed in such tangles of spaghetti code, and have been modified in undocumented ways so many times that no one now employed by the company knows how to fix them. In some cases, no one now alive knows how to fix them.

Year 2000 is the largest software maintenance project you will ever undertake. Don't underestimate the effort behind analysis, remediation, and testing. In all cases, you own the risk, and the only way to mitigate that risk is to start addressing the problem as realistically as possible. This problem is real, and it's not going away by itself.

There are 9,000 electric utility plants and 11,000 banks in [the U.S.]. Every one of them has a massive Y2K project with a fixed deadline. If you know anything about the software industry, you know that software projects are frequently late, over budget, and filled with bugs. So what are the odds that all 9,000 utilities and all 11,000 banks will be ready in time?

This is not a prediction, it is a certainty - there will be serious disruption in the world's financial services industry… It's going to be ugly.

At this point, you almost just have to cross your fingers.

People see TIME as an endless continuum.

Computers record time and dates as just another number, and as time progresses the time number gets bigger - so a FUTURE date is always LARGER than a PAST date.

Some programmers interfered with this nice progression by deleting the century digits from dates - they didn't think they would be needed!

Without the century digits the last day of this millennium will be 99-12-31, and after the stroke of midnight many computers will see January 1, 2000, as 00-01-01 - a SMALLER number than the day before - time will appear to have REVERSED.

OLD will seem YOUNG, a FEW moments will seem like an ENTIRE century, FUTURE events will have ALREADY occurred.

This problem is so big that we will consider these bugs to be out of the scope of our normal software maintenance contracts. For those clients who insist that we should take responsibility, we'll exercise the cancellation clause and terminate the outsourcing contract.

We've found that a lot of our clients are in denial. We spoke to one CIO who just refused to deal with the problem, since he's going to retire next year.

I only wish we had started earlier… it is very hard to pinpoint the issues to the problem… the reluctance to even admit there is a problem is worrisome… there seem to be a general hope for silver bullet solutions… and a general 'we'll do it later'-attitude.

I am personally concerned that the Y2K problem is receiving so little public attention. I am concerned that when it does become a matter of general public concern that it will be too late to bring pressure to bear on the timely correction of the many Y2K problems that exist. My greatest fear is that when it does become a matter of general public concern, it will bring with it a measure of panic that will be detrimental to effective and efficient remediation of the problems that will present themselves.

I am genuinely concerned about the prospects of power shortages as a consequence of the millennial date change. If the power grid goes down, then it is all over. It doesn't matter if every computer in the country is Y2K compliant if you can't plug it into something.

We're still flying blind… we simply do not really know what we need to know… The more we dig the more we find we do not know where they [the industries] are, simply because they don't really know themselves… it is important to put aside legal issues, it is really something that has to be dealt with later.

The fact is that with less than 18 months to go, I am very concerned that we are going to face serious economic dislocations from this problem. And I am very, very concerned that even as government and business leaders are finally acknowledging the seriousness of this problem, they are not thinking about the contingency plans that need to be put into place to minimize the harm from widespread failures. Quite honestly, I think we're no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be…It's been said before, but it bears repeating: Failure is simply not an option. If the critical industries and government agencies don't start to pick up the pace of dealing with this problem right now, Congress and the Clinton administration are to have to make some very tough decisions to deal with a true national emergency.

The real problems with most Y2K problems is not so much the date expansion, or the slight modifications to the programs, but HOW to implement hundreds of programs and convert hundreds of files all at the same time. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

The y2k-problem is a very serious threat to the US economy.

Failure to achieve compliance with the year 2000 will jeopardize our way of life on this planet for some time to come.

- Arthur Gross, Chief Information Officer, IRS, who later quit out of frustration

- Peter de Jager (in 1995)