Sam Izzo wrote to Ken Hrynchuk on 02-05-98:           
 KH> - also in BCD - see CMOS.LST). A lot of older ATs do not increment
 KH> the century byte with the passing of midnight, Jan. 31 1999 (mine
 SI> So, do they increment it at all?  Otherwise, it seems a bit redundant.
 
Yes, on these older machines it does appear to be so. I think it's just
a bug, although it could be a case of 'planned obsolescence'. There seem
to be various bits and bytes in the PC/DOS architecture that don't
function as planned; if at all. Another example in the CMOS is the
'daylight savings enable' bit (bit 0, offset 0BH).
 KH> BIOSes in the late 486/early Pentium era - these require a
 KH> replacement BIOS to function correctly. AFAIK, most (if not all) of
 SI> Hmm.. You can't just increment the century?
 
Not according to what I've heard and read; you have to change the BIOS's
code. I don't have any personal experience here, though, as I'm still
stuck in the early 90's era. :)
 KH> one. A lot of the programs in use today don't even bother with
 KH> checking the century, and this is going to lead to a _lot_ of
 SI> Yes, but most software, you'd think, would use a full 4-digit year, so
 SI> that  shouldn't be a problem.
It shouldn't be a problem, but it is; and a _big_ problem at that. In
fact, I recommend that you start testing any software that you think
you'll still be using in the year 2000. A couple of airlines in
Europe have already announced that they'll be grounding all flights
to the U.S. during the 1999-2000 changeover. The announcements came
after testing revealed that planes 'disappeared' from some American
airport radar screens with the arrival of Sat. Jan. 1, 2000.
 SI> Also, most operating systems manage to
 SI> figure it out  that the year should be 2000.  At least, in my test
 SI> MS-DOS 6.22 got it right.  I haven't tried it under Win95.
It's also been my experience that DOS (up to 6.20, anyway) is OK; but, I
don't think that life-support monitoring equipment in hospitals, and
bank machines, run DOS. :)  Also, DOS's 'clock' 'runs out' on Jan. 1,
2100.
As interesting as this problem is, I think we should close on this
topic, because Y2K does have its own echo.
 SI> Thanks for the reply!
You're quite welcome!
             Ken
 -- Y2K: "Hey, Visa says I owe them $3,812.46 in interest!"  
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