Hi Ian,

On 29-Nov-99, Ian Moote wrote to GEORGE WHITE:


 GW>> I believe the base OS is OK in all versions > OS/2 2.0.

 IM> Greater than v2.0? If you know that v2.0 os "no-good" then that
 IM> will answer my question. Can you tell me what the problem was with
 IM> v2.0?

Sorry, I was careless there :-(. Replace ">" by ">=" :-).

 IM>> Is this true of _all_ versions of OS/2, that they all use the RTC
 IM>> for for their TOD clock? (Is the 2079 a C thing?)
 IM> GW>
 GW>> Afaiaa it is true of all versions since OS/2 2.0. The 2079 is an
 GW>> OS/2 thing. Years >= 80 are considered to be 19xx, years < 80 are
 GW>> considered to be 20xx.

 IM> What?! I don't understand this. DOS is good until 2099, being
 IM> limited, really, only by the directory structure, but surely to
 IM> gawd OS/2 is good until at _least_ then! No, this doesn't sound
 IM> right. I've got to check this out. Hold on...

 IM> ...

 IM> Aw man! This really bites! I set my RTC to 2080 and OS/2 thought
 IM> that it was 1980! What an abortion! So what am I supposed to do in
 IM> 2080 -- go back to DOS? Yahoo. Don't throw out those copies of
 IM> Himem.Sys and Mscdex, folks -- what's old will be new again!

DOS will only get you 20 more years. It breaks in 2100 :-(
Anyway, how many of us are likely to care in 80 years time?

 IM> I'm not even going to say any more about it because this _really_
 IM> ticks me off.

I expect OS/2 to be totally obsolete long before then, and the only
real interest will be in museums (Smithsonian? Science Museum?) where,
if they actually run the machines, having them set to a date
appropriate to their age rather then the current date wouldn't be a
problem.

According to tests run by some of the other echo users the 2079 thing
is *NOT* a problem with OS/2 itself (by that I mean the base OS
resident in memory) but with the support utilities provided with it.
If you've seen JdeBPs postings you'll have noted that the 32 bit OS/2
API returns time as a _64_ bit second count, which lasts for centuries
rather than years.

Anyway, let's face it, compared with the problem of C time _ending_
for most compilers & current versions of *NIX in 2038 it's a _much_
longer time span (100 years as against the 68 of C & *NIX).

George

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