Message-Id: <1.5.4.32.19980219175301.0068e19c@pop.netaddress.com>
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Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 17:53:01 +0000
To: Travis Siegel <tsiegel AT softcon DOT com>
From: J P Morris <b52g AT usa DOT net>
Subject: Re: questions please.
Cc: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Precedence: bulk

At 10:18 19/02/98 +0000, you wrote:
>Hmm.  I'm a little puzzled.  Why does dos need a special y2K fix?  My
>understanding was that the software would work just fine up to 2059.  A
>quick browsing of the source code shows this to be so.  (because of the
>way it handles dates and times)  What's the y2k fix? And, why is it
>necessary?

The year 2000 support prevents the computer from going back to 1900 if it is
left running at 23:59 on dec 31, 1999.

This is mostly just a convinience, but it can be very valuable for BBS systems 
and such that are left on all the time.

Also, MSDOS (and other dos-a-likes, including DRDOS v6) will go back to 1980
when they are switched on again come the 1st January 2000.
The DRDOS 7 kernel has a fix to prevent this, and it will always go to the
right date, even if the BIOS doesn't support it.

This feature has been with DRDOS since the initial 7.02 alpha 1 release, but
there have been some interesting problems involving PCI cards, which have 
finally been fixed.

DOS should work until the year 2035 or thereabouts, when the number of seconds
since some date in the past overflows..

Look around for some year-2000 checking programs.  Try them with the
year2000=off line in your config sys file, and see what happens.

If you have any more questions, just ask.

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