"... an interesting prank ..."
If it hasn't been mentioned before, you might want to take a look at
www.year2000.com
to see what serious concern there is about the upcoming problem with
two-digit years in computer applications and hardware. It won't be
necessary to play any pranks; some discussions anticipate infrastructure
failure in the worst scenario. The Social Security Administration has
estimated that it might cost $50 BILLION to correct their millions of
lines of code that rely on two-digit year calculations over the next few
years!
Although DOS itself (and Windows) will make the 1999-2000 year
transition, the PC is not immune to the problem since the CMOS RTC (the
hardware clock) only keeps a two-digit year; the century is not
maintained by hardware, so it will go from 1999 to 1900. The next boot
will produce a DOS system date of January 4, 1980. Many of your PC
applications will catastrophically fail.
Year2000.EXE, a free fix for the PC hardware year 2000 flaw, is available
at the URL below.
Tom
--... ...--
http://rampages.onramp.net/~gtbecker
Air System Technologies Inc, Dallas
BBS: (500)673-4625 Vox: (500)448-9660
Accurate time: (500)346-TIME [1200E71]
