Small Company Y2K Report essays

Small Company Y2K Report essays 3. Hardware and Software Compliance It is a problem resulting from the common programming practice of using only two-digits to store the year in software. The practice dates back to the 1950's when computers began to be used for business purposes. Using two digits for dates is benign and causes no harm so long as the next year is a larger number than the current year. For example software applications that use dates have no problem with the sequence of 95,96,97,98 and 99. However, when the century ends, the year 2000 will be stored as 00. Calculations or decisions, based on dates or time periods, can go seriously wrong. Inregard to personal and small business computers, the problem is three fold. Firstly, the computer hardware must report the current date correctly. Many computers, especially early Pentiums, 486, 386 and 286 based machines, will on the 1st January 2000 Revert back to 1 April 1980 or some other date. Thus creating a potential problem until the correct date is re-entered - provided of course that the computer can be set manually to a date beyond 311299. Calculation of Leap Year dates may also be incorrect on some computers. Secondly, the computer software must carry out the correct calculations based on a four-digit year (e.g. 1999 or 2000 etc) rather than just using the last two digits. The supplier or manufacturer of the software should be approached to ascertain the compliance of their code, or their schedule to have it corrected and distributed. Thirdly, your data must be in the correct format - namely year described as a four-digit number. If your dates have been entered as described above (that is 15th Feb 1955 entered as 150255), then you have a data conversion to be carried out. To determine if Windows NT 4.0 ,Win95 and would roll to the appropriate date, the control panel applet "DATE&TIME"(d&t) was used to change the dates. The machines d&t were set to the day before each date outlined in the ...