Satgen563 Y2K . OK ? by GM4IHJ (BID SGEN563) 2000-01-08 The new millenium is here, and all the "AFTER THOUGHT" experts are lustily proclaiming that there never was a millenium bug problem. Such is the penalty for doing something, right, for once. But as we finished the last chorus of Auld Lang Syne here in Scotland, it was clear that a few things were still awry. Some Windows 95 systems seem to have entered the new millenium announcing that it was 1st January 1980. Fortunately they were soon restored to the present by a simple correction of Date/Time. More astonishing was the packet bulletin board that told it users Thank you for your call on 31st December 0 . But even that soon disappeared. Not so easy was the problem at a factory with elderly machines using date conscious Stone Age software. Compiled software for which no one now had the source code. That has been temporarily resolved by resetting the date so that the software thinks it is back in a previous 20th century year when 1st January was a saturday and, very important , the year was a leap year ( perhaps 1972 if the arithmetic is correct). Meanwhile the new keplerian elements have arrived for year 2000 . They feature as forecast an Epoch year 00. At IHJ this has been fixed by adding a program line as follows :- IF EPOCHYEAR NUMBER IS < 57: EPOCHYEAR NUMBER = EPOCHYEAR NUMBER + 100 This allows business as usual until 2057, the hundredth anniversary of the first artificial satellite SPUTNIK 1 So will it all be plain sailing hereafter. Not exactly. There are still a number of bugs around. Typical of these is Real Time 200 . Note 200 not 2000. Some will already have met this bug when they updated to a fast modern CPU such as a Pentium II or III. If you havent updated this is what you can expect if you do. You try to run some old programs on your new, faster than 220 MHz PC. It tells you real time 200 failure. What has happened is that you are running a program probably compiled on something like Borland Pascal. The writers of that compiler never dreamed that micro computers would one day cruise along at 400 MHz plus. So they set the compiler to clock at about 220 MHz. Result is that on a 300 MHz plus processor it never gets in step. Hence the report of real time 200 failure. The originators of this problem are long gone to that software writers rest home down below. But so many people have falsely blamed either Microsoft or Intel, for the problem , that both these companies have copious details of fixes on their internet pages. Try there if the software supplier cannot help you.