Having trouble because my headers aren't changing colors after reading a new thread so I was browsing through whatever I could find and went to properties under the "file" heading for this site. On my general tab is the following information: Created: Monday, January 25, 1999 Modifies: Monday, January 25, 1999 Updated: Monday, January 01, 1601

How did the year 1601 get in there? This is strange and I still cannot get the posts that I have read to change colors. Is anyone else having troubles and seeing funny dates? Mary

-- Mary Howe (doesnotmatter@thistime.com), January 25, 1999

Answers

Your battery is probably low. You may not want to get it changed: You now have 399 years to fix your computer for Y2k

-- Slocum (jobs@woz.com), January 25, 1999.

Now you have got me, Mary. I have never seen that one before - if someone figures it out I would like to know how it happened. And if Shakespeare wanders by - say hello for me, will ya?

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), January 25, 1999.

I'm getting the same readings. It seems to be the greenspun pages, not our PC's.

-- Elbow Grease (Elbow_Grease@AutoShop.com), January 25, 1999.

Same here. Any thread on this forum or the Electric Utilities and Y2K Q&A Forum shows:

Created: January 01, 1601

Not that I believe it.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), January 25, 1999.

The January 1, 1601 date is probably a default "start" date for the calendar calculations in your software.

If you know the complete rules for leap years in the Gregorian calendar, you know that three out of every four century years ("nn00") are non-leap years. The only century years that are leap years are those divisible by 400, such as 2000 and 2400 will be ... and 1600 was.

I can imagine that whoever wrote the calendar calculations in your software decided that there'd never be a need to work with a date earlier than the 1600s, so for convenience used the first day of 1601 to start counting days. (And thus wouldn't have to deal with the 400-year exception leap year of 1600 -- but this suggests that it may not handle February 29, 2000 correctly.)

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), January 25, 1999.

Was 1600 a leap year, or a lept year?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), January 26, 1999.