New York, NY — As CNNfn reported, amid all the dire warnings about the impending doom associated with the Year 2000 problem, a little-known company in Waltham, Mass., is claiming to have a solution and some big-name customers for it.
Data Integrity Inc. says its product, called Millennium Solution, can drastically reduce the time necessary to prepare a database for the year 2000 – a date change that has many computer programmers panicked.
The software, the company claims, is getting the nod from such heavyweight organizations as Citibank, NationsBank and the Interior Department. The product was cleared for a U.S. patent in June, according to a statement on the company’s website.
Millennium Solution, developed by Data Integrity founder Allen Burgess, treats the Year 2000 dilemma as a math problem, whereas other products search for dates.
Because older computer systems, such as those used by banks or government institutions, use only the last two digits of the year, a system wouldn’t know if 00 is 1900 instead of 2000. The two-digit method particularly becomes a problem when a computer attempts to figure out a person’s age.
In the year 2000, older computer systems could calculate the age of a person born in 1902 as negative 2 instead of 98. Such errors would wreak havoc on personal finance and other important records.
Millennium Solution searches for the math in a software program, then instructs the program to add 50, then add 50 again.
Data Integrity says Millennium Solution’s method significantly reduces the time it takes to test a system because it makes fewer changes to a system’s code than other products.