A friend of mine has an old computer (486) that he doesn’t want to upgrade. (He just does word processing and a little database management on it.) He had some Y2K concerns, so he had me look at it.
The database program (that I wrote) worked OK. It accepts 4-digit years, but defaults to 1900-dates if you only use 2 digits. I also changed the date to after 1/1/2000, and the program worked well.
The real problem was when I set the PC to 12-31-1999 at 23:59. When the clock rolled over a minute later, it said Jan. 4, 1980.
I told my friend to just adjust his clock New Year’s Day to the right date, and everything should countinue working well. But I have since learned that this problem has been noticed before, and the fix is to replace the clock chip.
The computer held the date when I chaged it specifically. It rolled from 1-1-2000 to 1-2-2000 and other 2000-dates as hoped. But will the date fail later on?
Is my solution too simple, or is it just right?