Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

Phil Barnett wrote: > There is another very important year 2000 problem that is not in the > above list. > > Most PC's built before this year have a hardware problem (or firmware) > dealing with the year 2000. So no matter what you do to your software, > your PC will roll from 12/31/1999 to 01/01/1980 instead of 01/01/2000. Robert Cringely of InfoWorld pointed this out in a column a year or so ago, mentioning that it happened on his 486, but not his pentium. His answer: "No biggie; by 2000 the only thing we'll be running on 486s will be our vacuum cleaners." At that time his claim sounded reasonable (well, reasonable time-wise, not appliance-wise), but as the big year approaches, one wonders how many 486 desktops will still be running. In my "spare time" I frankenstein old PCs together for non-profits, and they routinely run three- to six-year old motherboards. -- Paul T. O'Leary Evco Plastics, a leader plastics injection molding DeForest, WI USA