Wanna see something cool? If your are running WIN95 Open the Control Panel Click on Date/Time Use the scroll arrows for the year Start scrolling up through the years pay attention when you get to YY99 Keep going Surprise, surprise, surprise Just thought I would let everyone know.

-- John Callon (jcallon@gate.net), August 07, 1998

Answers

What's your point? Nothing happened here!

-- Buddy Y. (buddy@bellatlantic.net), August 07, 1998.

Keep going until you get to 2099 then click for what should be 2100 you will get 1980 or 1985 or some other year. The point being can we trust Win95 to corectly handle 1999 to 2000 even though it seems to be correct. I tested this on three computers two win95 and one win nt 4.0 all with the dame result.

-- John callon (jcallon@gate.net), August 07, 1998.

I got the date 1985, when I went to 2100! Makes me feel safe!? But, why does this happen at 2100 instead of 2000?

-- Gina Decker (gngdecker@ckt.net), August 07, 1998.

When I did it at work on 2 machines, and at home on this machine, it cycled from 1/1/1980 to 12/31/2099. It also does not allow you to type the year. My colleague and I thought maybe it was just a limitation in Control Panel so I tried it at the DOS prompt too.

When I attempted to set the date on 1-1-2100, the error said it was an illegal date. I then set it at 12-31-2099 and set the time to 11:59:59pm. The time then cycled past midnight, but the date didn't change!!! Without thinking about it I clicked on Netscape, which happened to be open at the Westergaard Y2K web-site, and we noticed that the date in the upper right corner of the page said 12-31-1969!!! We started laughing!!! I then checked the date in DOS again, it still read 12-31-2099. My colleague then reminded me to set the date back to today, of course.

We then did a "view source" on the Westergaard page. There was Java script there dealing with the date. I had read earlier today that some C library programs would reset to 1-1-1970 when they roll over, but that they were good until 2038. So it was bizarre and totally unexpected!!! Somehow, we think, Java or some code in Netscape interpreted a date over its limit and ended up with 12-31-1969.

My colleague and I came to the conclusion that there wasn't a reliability problem with the PC or Win95, but there was a Year 2100 problem. On reflection, we also concluded that there is a general date problem across the board. Eventually, a way must be found to represent any point in time if the world is going to continue to allow machines to rely on dates and times.

Very interesting...but I still don't think it means that chaos is a foregone conclusion.

P.S. ...After writing the above I just tried changing the year only on my PC to see if I could find the limit. I set a browser window back on Westergaard's page. Anything above 2037 reads Dec. 31, 1969. 2037 reads 192037!!! I took it down to 2020--I'll be 60 that year if I make it that far. It still reads 192020!!! I'm starting to laugh so hard now I can't write any more!!! A Y2K page has a date problem!!! ROFL!!!

How did we get into this mess!!!

It's Friday, I'm going to try to take a break from this issue for awhile. Have a good weekend!!!

ROFL!!!

-Buddy

-- Buddy Y. (buddy@bellatlantic.net), August 07, 1998.

We got into this mess because what goes up must come down. We all thought we were so smart that we could out wit, manipulate, and transform mankind into a machine. I guess the machine is having the last laugh.

-- Bewildered (sittingback@aol.com), August 08, 1998.

It should come as no surprise that dates past 2099-12-31 are not supported. It is inherent in the design of system directories that the year is stored as a 7 bit field, the possible range of values is 0 thru 128, 1980 (or zero) is the seed start date. In theory the upper limit should be 2107, in fact it is 2099. Get over it. None of us will be alive to be surprised.

-- Chris Anderson (slug@fast.co.za), August 08, 1998.