Year 2000 and the Computer

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Articles and Papers

Written About the Millennium

Start Fixing Year 2000 Problems Now! by Joe Celco

Datamation, January 1, 1996

The real killer will be Intel-based PCs. When the odometer wraps around, DOS jumps to 1980 most of the time, and sometimes to 1984, depending on your BIOS chip. Windows 3.1 jumps to 1900 most of the time. You can test this for yourself. Set the date and time on your PC to 1999-12-31 at 23:59:30 Hrs, and let the clock run. What happens next depends on your BIOS chip and version of DOS. (ed note: The results also vary between letting the PC run through midnight and having it turned off.)

The clock display may show "12:00AM" and the date display "01/01/00," so you think you have no problems. However, you could find that you have newly created files dated in 1984 or in 1980. Surprise!

Mr. Celco also points out some other huge problems both within and out side the computer industry. Do you have ANY filing or number-identification system where the first two digits for the next entry is "97"? The full text of this very understandable technical paper can be found at:

Start Fixing Year 2000 Problems Now! . . . gary, 2/18/97

To the question of systems using "97" - I know I do? My neatly lined up WordPerfect files are "organized" with names such as joe-9714.wp to denote the 14th letter to Joe this year. The yearly checkbook registers which were ported for the first time from a CDC-6600 in 1973, are neatly organized as cbk71 through cbk97 ... a full character short of the 6 allowed by the then-powerful KRONOS operating system. Anyhow, after almost 30 continuous years using the same basic system, with full backward capability and the ability to look at any check over a very long time ... cbk00 is going to force a change. .. gary