Contact: Marianne Ward; Phone: (573) 341-4328; [email protected] August 19, 1998
UMR GRADUATE'S ANALYZER FINDS YEAR 2000 COMPUTER BUG
ROLLA, Mo. -- Six years ago, Rex Widmer couldn't find a taker for his software analyzer of dinosaur computer code. But now, with everyone fretting about the Y2K computer bug, Widmer's Portfolio Analyzer is a hot commodity.
Six years ago, an asking price of $150,000 for the entire product and associated rights seemed fair to Widmer. But no one came forward with a legitimate offer. Personal computers dominated the market, driving mainframes into near extinction. Or so potential buyers thought.
Widmer of Shawnee Mission, Kan., a 1972 computer science graduate of the University of Missouri-Rolla, grimaces when he thinks about how close he came to selling the software for a fraction of its worth today, as thousands of companies and government agencies scramble to fix the year 2000 "computer bug."
"I had been willing to sell the entire set of technology outright for what today is the gross for fewer than 10 licenses," Widmer says. "I would have sold it lock, stock and barrel."
Fortunately for Widmer and UMR, no one wanted the software then. But everyone with a mainframe seemingly wants it now. Although it wasn't created to combat the Year 2000 computer bug, it works wonders for locating the lines of code that need to be changed to fix the problem. Widmer's analyzer locates the date code lines so they can be reprogrammed to recognize that years have four digits, not just two; thus eliminating confusion about what year it is.
"The tool does nothing that someone who is familiar with codes and compilers can't do by hand, one or two programs a day; however, this will take the largest installation that we've ever encountered and do the entire installation in one day," Widmer says. "It will munch through 100,000 programs -- perhaps 100 million lines of code -- in a day. Our normal test case is to do 20,000 programs in a bit over an hour."
Widmer warns, however, that the Portfolio Analyzer is "not a silver bullet" solution to the Year 2000 bug. It helps identify application components "which obtain the system date from either the operating system or hardware," Widmer says. It "also recovers compiler directives and application structure information from the executable (compiled) forms of application programs."
The Portfolio Analyzer is currently licensed to more than 150 corporations and governmental agencies worldwide. Each sale benefits UMR directly. Widmer gives one percent of gross sales to his alma mater, helping move UMR toward its Full Circle Campaign goal of raising $60 million by the year 2001.
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