Okay,
I wasn't expecting to stir the hornets nest with my last posting, but
considereing the fact that I have recieved 192 e-mail messages in 12
hous in response my last posting, I decided to respond. As Paul pointed
out, the Y2K problem will really only affect mainfram systems. I am a
Cobol Programmer in training. And for those who are not programmers or
are not famillar with mainframe systems, where Cobol is most likely to
reside, the problem with Cobol is this: 98/03/10. Notice the year is
only 2 digits and not 4. When IBM created the COLBOL language, they
forgot to add the century digits. So when the clock rolles around on
31st December 1999, the computer will then return to 19 00/01/01. What
will happen with that is that depending on what the computer system
does, it can shut down or really drive things completely nuts for
several months. A case study was done by Hawaii Electric 2 years ago.
They got a bunch of people to cooperate and set the clock on the
computer ahead to 31st December 1999. When the clock turned to 1st
January 2000, the computer shut down electricity to the portion of
Honolulu that was being tested. It took them three days just to get the
electricity back on. That was the worst case possibility.
As for many of you pointed out, what about our computers. Your PC
computer with a 8086,8088,286,386,486,586,686 processors will not be
affected. On 1st January 2000, you will beable to turn your computer on
with no problem. If you are a Windows 95 user, your computer is
programmed for year 2000 and beyond. If you are a windows 3.1 user, all
you have to do is go into the control panel, and set the century digits
to 2000. Windows 3.1 is not programmed for the century digits to change.
On your FT-1000MP's and coffee makers, as I got 47 e-mail messages
with, as well as digit watches, there will be no problem at all. The
FT-1000MP like every other radio from Yaesu, Kenwood, Icom, and Ten-Tec,
not to mention all the other manufactures, will still work on 1st
January 2000, that is if we still have electricity that day. The
FT-1000MP does not have a clock for it to keep track of time. And there
is no, I repeat no date text at all in the radio. So you don't have to
worry about that. I was not blowing off the orginal question, it was a
perfectly legit question. After all, with everything that is going on
about te Y2K problem, one does have to wonder what goes on. The only
ones that should be worrying about the Y2K problem are the companies
with mainframes that have not been set for the year 2000.
Hopefully this passage was informative, and will not result in another
192 e-mails to my address. But maybe we should start worrying about the
y2.1k problem, not only do we have to worry about the century digit,
because of the Gregorian Calunder which we all use, we have to worry
about the fact that there is no 29th February 2100. I hope I am alive
then, I want to see how the calender makers are going to handle that
one, as well as the digital watches.
73's to all,
Adam
KB2GEG
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