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are among the first instances of mass updates. Mass updates had never happened
before, but they will happen again, with ever-increasing costs and difficulty be-
cause legacy applications are continuing to grow faster than they can be replaced.
Many problems associated with the insufficient numbers of digits will occur
during the next 50 years, too, but when these issues will pop up is somewhat un-
predictable.
An interesting report by Dr. Clifford Kurtzman notes that the population of the
United States will exceed the capacity of unique ten-digit phone numbers for all
callers before the year 2025 and perhaps as early as 2015 due to the huge increases
in multiphone families brought about by smartphones. Already, there is a need to
reassign area codes to help solve this problem.
In 2038, the internal Unix clock will overflow, causing a kind of mini-Y2K
problem for Unix systems.
The availability of unique U.S. social security numbers (each nine digits long)
may be exceeded by about the middle of the century, say 2050. Other similar prob-
lems are ISBNs, which now have 13 digits rather than just 10 digits, and IP ad-
dresses.
The cumulative costs of expanding numeric fields as their capacity is exceeded
will erode many of the economic advantages derived from using computers and
software. It is obvious that a more permanent general schema must be developed
before numeric-field maintenance expenses in legacy applications become severe.
None of these numeric- and date-related software updates will add useful new
features or functions to applications. Their main purpose is merely to allow the
applications to continue to operate when dates or numeric information exceed the
available sizes of the fields originally set aside to store the information.
The software industry is currently dealing with each problem individually as it
occurs, rather than seeking general solutions to the fundamental problem. It might
be time for an international symposium on the problem of dates and computers in
order to address the root causes of such problems.
Four possible solutions can be envisioned for the fundamental problem of in-
adequate date and numeric field sizes:
• Developing standard formats for dates that will not expire in short periods
• Developing methods for finding hidden or indirect dates with high effi-
ciency
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