I wasn't describing any chips with date problems.
I was describing a custom-designed lithography system which handled every state-of-the-art chip that our organization designed, built, and shipped.
The in-house designers who created the lithography system implemented it in such a way that the mini-computer which controlled the process also handled the record-keeping and process-flow for the chips. It was little different than all other applications which incorrectly handled dates.
The key difference was that the equipment was involved in the handling of every single chip we created and would not have scheduled work correctly due to the error.
We identified the problem early enough to completely solve the problem. That does not change the fact that failing to have done so would have created errors that might have taken many weeks to discover and many more weeks to solve. All during those weeks production would have been severely negatively impacted.
The key fact to keep in mind is that not all companies who created state-of-the-art chips in the year 2000 had the resources of Intel to do so. The volume of chips that we created was an incredibly small fraction of those manufactured by Intel.
Intel is a remarkable company. We enjoyed that project and came to respect Intel personnel.
Yes, I can understand how records with date dependency could screw up processes like those at Intel. Things were sure to cross that pesky 2000 boundary.