Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> Check this out! I fired up my brother's 386SX16 in his basement, changed
> the date and watched it roll over to January 1, 2000. I then edited a file
> and checked the date written to that file. The result was 1/01/2000. I left
> it at the year 2000 and everything runs great even after shutting the power
> off and turning it back on! In Windows 3.11 there's a clock, which I
> enabled and watched as the date was 1/1/2000 and the time kept ticking away
> like it always has.
>
> So tell me what all the fuss is about with this Y2K thing - Please!!! Is it
> just another marketing ploy to get people to buy more computers? If not
> that, then what's the motives? Or is this just related to mainframes?
>
> Confused and unconvinced there's a "real" problem,
This probably has nothing to do with win3.1. The Real Time Clock in the
system itself (hardware) is either Y2K compliant, or windows is matching
itself against another clock.
Clocks are the least of the problem. What if you fix everything on your
system, and then introduce a Word macro you haven't used in 5 years that
inserts 2 digit date fields into an Access database. What if the
database software, when it applies macros, uses the clock in the machine
to stamp the date (compliant), but the database program uses a software
clock from a different source (not compliant). That macro then
introduces data your system can't mesh (a four digit date and a two
digit date to which it can't assign a definite century), and your
records are screwed, if not BSOD'd.
It's the little fine things like this that are torture. I forget where
i saw the analogy, but you're taking the corporate exec view: "Y2K is a
simple problem. we have to go out and polish X marbles before 2000. we
know how many marbles there are, so we throw people at the problem until
we have enough people to polish all the marbles in time."
In reality: the marbles are moving from system to system at lightning
speed all day long, and some marbles infect marbles you just cleaned,
and other marbles can be re-infected by hardware doing the moving. The
only way to solve the problem under the previous view is to stop all
computers, fix all the marbles concurrently, and start them again. This
latter view shows the reality--everything you fix today has to be
checked again on Dec 31, 1999 to make sure it didn't have a new problem
introduced.
Y2K occurs at multiple levels: hardware, software, hardware/software
interfaces, hardware/hardware interfaces, software/software interfaces.
You can be 100% Y2K compliant on 1/1/00, and a bad database file with a
single record sent to you by a client could cause Access to lock on you,
or reintroduce problems to otherwise clean data.
Sorry, can't go into multi-volume tutorial today, but I recently had Y2K
issues dumped on my desk. After two months of regular reading I can say
for sure you're missing a lot . . . but am not even close to
understanding yet myself how much ;)
If all that is in your Y2K plan is to check clocks, though, I'd back-up
my checkbook before 12/31/99 ;)
Brett
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