Hi James,

 JAH> And it will take a lot longer than a month to make Max y2k compliant

As a matter of fact, it will *not* take longer than a month to make Maximus
Y2K-compliant.  The number of changes required to make Maximus work with
Y2K dates were very minimal.

For that matter, the released version of Maximus 3.01 works with Y2K dates
in most areas of the program without any problems at all.

To the best of my knowledge, the only part of Maximus 3.01 that is
completely Y2K-dysfunctional is the QWK mail packer, thanks to some
QuickBASIC-derived srtuctures.  The rest of the system seems to be fine
except for cosmetic details.

For example, some dates are accidentally displayed with a three-digit year
rather than a two-digit year.  (The date is still stored correctly
internally.)

Entry of Y2K dates is a little awkward (use an offset from year 1900, so
the year 2003 is "103"), but if you use that approach, the dates
are still stored correctly inside the system.

To give you an idea of how Y2K-compliant the *existing* version of Maximus
is, we have a few banks as customers who had 06/30/98 deadlines to make all
of their computer systems Y2K-compliant.  These customers were able to
write their own MEX and MECCA scripts to filter date inputs from the user
(in an intuitive format), process them, and ensure that the output was in a
format that Maximus could handle.  The systems worked well enough that they
were able to pass the Y2K auditors' checks.

The real Y2K work with Maximus was limited to a small number of functions
that handle date entry and display.  These changes took a couple of hours,
if I recall correctly.  Given that 3.01 was released in 1995 (which was
long before most people started worrying about Y2K), I don't think that
this is that bad at all.  Almost all of the data storage structures within
Maximus itself can handle dates up to the year 2150 or something along
those lines.  It was only the formatting and display that was causing
trouble.

Those changes were actually completed around the middle of the year; the
real work was making the code function properly with a new compiler
version.  This work has not been at the top of the priority list as of
late, but it is moving up there.  I expect that I will deal with this
problem by the end of the year.

I hope this clears up any misconceptions that people may have about Maximus and Y2K.

---