NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article
Travels into the Land of Y2K
John R. Clark, Webmaster, October 99
rcmahq@nwark.com
(click to email author)


With a hundred days to go before the Y2K bug is going to byte, I thought it would be nice to see how it could impact my toys which I have collected over the years.

It seems evident the Y2K problem is, like Gaul, divided into three parts or as Caesar would say "Y2K est omnis divsa in partis tris". The parts are The BIOS, The Processor, and The Software.

To check the BIOS, I fired up all the computers I had that were in working order and set the date to 12-31-1999 and the time to one minute before midnight and turned them off. A couple of minutes later I turned them on as a check to see if they would come up, and they did. The next check was to see what date it was. The results were interesting. The HP 95LX said 1-1-00 the HP 100LX said 1-1-2000, the Toshiba portable 286 said 1-1-80, the no-name 386 said 1-1-80, the no-name 486 said 4-1-80 Looked like a BIOS problem with the date on the big three but the time portion of the clock was accurate. It took me a few minutes to realize the HPs can't be shut off unless you remove all the batteries.

The fact the computers came up indicated to me the BIOS will bring the systems back, set me off on the second step into the land of Y2K. For this step I set the date to 7-4-2020 and the time to 1 minute before midnight and waited. All the computers rolled over to July 5th indicating the processor chips could handle dates beyond 1999. The 8-bit chips in the HPs, the 16-bit chip in the 286, and the 32-bit chips in the 386 and 486 will. It looks like if you have "Intel Inside" your computer the Y2K dates won't be a problem. All you will have to do each day is set the date like you had to do in the old days before they had the battery back up. Think of it this way you will never have to buy a new battery.

Now comes the big step -- the software applications. The problems here can be divided into two parts. Applications that work off the date in the processor should work. e.g. the metric time and date function that I passed out in November 1998 will work in 2020. Applications that rely on dates stored in your data may be a big problem.

For this check most people should make a back up of their data, then change the date and see what happens. In my case the only such data is my bank checks log where the year is recorded in two digits. What I plan to do is change the sort program so in a sort on the date for the first digit, I will change the collating sequence to '5678901234' which will place the years 99 00 ... 10 etc in order. This allows me to put the problem off till 2049, and I am not overly worried about what happens then.

Footnote:


This convention of storing the year in two digits came from the use of unit record cards {remember don't fold, spindle or mutilate}. In those days 1950's it was necessary. However when the big computers with tapes and disks came along in the 1960's the blame lies with those pointy headed Dilbert style data managers who are promoted to a level beyond their competency level and now refuse to hire anyone who is smarter than they are. Couple this with the failure of the Modern Math teaching in the 1960's we now have a large number of people that believe in base 10 and are firm in their belief that 1 plus 1 is 2. {For each such calculation today there are thousands made where 1 plus 1 is 0 with a carry.} Today we are still storing data in human readable (base 10) format when it must be converted to the binary format for the computer to use. It is a sad comment on our "modern" civilization.

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