>It's nice to see that I have been driving a computer which doesn't have to
>worry about trivial things like the end of the millenium. All Macintoshes
>have had capability into the 21st century since they were developed in
>1983. I can spend the money on my MG.
*ALL* IBM and clone based PCs (8086 through Pentium II and Pentium Pro) will
*not* have a problem with the year 2000.
The problem resides with the large mainframes developed by IBM, Honeywell,
Cray, etc which were built when iron ferrite cores were used for memory. Since
this was a cost-prohibitive way of doing things (this was around the late 50s
and 60s) memory was scant. The programmers of these machines, feeling that
there was no way that they would be in use in the year 2000, only designed the
programs to handle dates in two numbers (eg: 98 = 1998) - since the programs
didn't have to deal with keeping the extra two bytes of 19 in memory, they
saved space. (this was back with these machines only had 4096 bytes of memory)
The year 2000 problem lays not in the *hardware*, but in the millions of lines
of software written for these machines.
I also simply post this as an explanation, so that those on the list don't
panic about their "inferior" IBM hardware. =)
(notice the quotes around inferior...)
>> If your computer does manage to role-over there is
>> a problem, do you know if it is a leap year.
Computers (even Mac!) can handle this. There's an algorythm set up in the BIOS
for this. Not a problem.
BEN RUSET - http://www.monmouth.com/~bruset
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Safety Fast & MG Cars Webring - http://www.infi-pos.com/~oasis
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