There is an excellent article about the myths, realities, and technical problems of embedded systems, written by a contractor hired to help remediate an electric utility, at:

http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19981214S0057

Here is the final paragraph:

"Although much of the in-depth system testing is just beginning, there have been several reports of significant date errors found and corrected. Some of the test results would have been very serious if they had occurred during normal plant operation. It is hoped that this will serve as a wake-up call to those who operate their facilities and as a sobering reminder to the experts who believe the problems are trivial and the severity blown out of proportion to the actual danger."

-- Anonymous, December 14, 1998

Answers

Excerpt from http://www.tmn.com/~frautsch/y2k2.html

Embedded Systems and the Year 2000 Problem by Mark Frautschi, PhD

"...[The] lack of documentation makes it difficult or impossible for the chip manufacturers' customers, the OEMs, to evaluate the Year-2000-compliance of their products that depend upon these chips. This places a significant assessment, remediation and testing burden on organizations with a large investment in embedded systems within their mission critical infrastructure. The electric power utilities are among the organizations with the greatest exposure. Utilities that have completed a thorough assessment program have generally elected to test all embedded systems, including those with existing documentation, due to significant variations between observed performance and documentation. There are as many as ten technological viewpoints affecting the Year-2000-compliance of an individual embedded system in a particular application that may be affected by the chip maker, the OEM, the end-user or various combinations. Please see reference [14] for a brief discussion ...."

[Reference ]14 .Beginning at the "black box" or "device" level it is appropriate to examine the individual embedded system from as many as ten technological viewpoints. These are chips and microcode, pre-manufacture custom functionality, post-manufacture custom functionality, interfacing of devices, drivers, operating systems, vendor-supplied application libraries, user defined functionality, user integration of systems and devices and the business processes associated with system use. In short, the manufacture and configuration of the embedded system and its application contain factors affecting overall Year-2000-compliance. Please see R. Strem and M. Smith: http://www.esofta.com/pdfs/Y2KEmb.pdf 12 December 1997. "

I believe Mark has documented an instance where executing a test scenario on the same chip (as well different chip/ same batch) more than one time results in different outcomes. That's a little disconcerting, so I'll look into that further.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 1998