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Good news from Tennessee. Well, good press releases anyway.
The state has worked on y2k for a decade. It's now two-thirds completed.
This is the good news. The bad news is that after ten years, it's two-thirds completed.
And every other state started a lot later.
The state has 20 million lines of code.
They will be finished with programming and ready for testing in . . . you guessed it . . . December, 1998.
This is an AP story published in the OAK RIDGER (Feb. 12).
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NASHVILLE -- He may have his fingers crossed behind his back, but Bradley Dugger says he's confident the computers in Tennessee's state government will roll into the next millennium without a problem.
At least, not much of a problem.
''I don't want to brag, but we really are pleased with where we are compared to other states,'' said Dugger, chief of information systems in the Department of Finance and Administration.
Tennessee will spend about $10 million -- $4 million is budgeted this year -- to wrestle its computers into the new millennium. Compared to other states, that's a bargain. One clearinghouse estimates that fixing the Millennium Glitch will cost several states $100 million, with some estimates as high as $200 million.
Thanks to the foresight of Dugger and others, the Tennessee government has been working on the changeover for a decade and is already about two-thirds finished. . . .
The National Association of State Information Resource Executives surveyed 29 states and came up with estimates of between $100 million and $200 million in Maryland and North Carolina. . . .
The state's total cost will be about $15.5 million, of which about a third is federal money.
''Our schedule calls for us to be finished by the end of this year, then we'll use the first six months of '99 to check everything out,'' Dugger said.
Dugger said the state began requiring year 2000 compliance for its new computers and software up to a decade ago, and began recoding the computers it planned to keep beyond the millennium about 18 months ago.
''The state has about 20 million lines of code in our system. We had to go in and look at every code line to figure out what we had to change and not change,'' Dugger said. ''It's not real hard, but it's real big.''
Some of the state's systems already have begun dealing with 2000 and beyond -- driver's licenses, for example, are issued for five years, so those computers already have to be 2000 compliant.
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