Discuss Year 2000 Issues Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues

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To: C.K. Houston who wrote ()	11/22/1997 6:57:00 PM
From: C.K. Houston	Read Replies (1) of 9818

RETAIL PROBLEM: Whoops! Cash Register doesn't Work ============================================================ SIM Discussion Group: Embedded Systems/Testing Bruce Hevner Nov. 18 7:58AM 1997 I have a Royal#ER246 Cash Register purchased new in 1988 for a small business I had at the time. It has 4 separate departments that it keeps totals for. It has a time and date stamp on the reciept and when taking department totals. Just for fun I dug that thing out and ran the following test. I set the date at 11:58 12-31-99. The date rolled (on or off) to show 00 as the year. I then tried to set the date to Feb 28 to check for leap year. No good. It would not let me make ANY settings using 00 as the year digits. So if you were using this thing it would appear to be working OK for awhile in 2000. BUT if for any reason you wanted to change anything DURING 2000 you would not be able to do so. If for instance you lost power (it has battery backup but only for a certain time) and you lost the date during 2000 you would not be able to reset it. It would take a date with 01 as the year. Now how many small business owners out there have registers/POS systems that act like this, or worse? Ask your local merchants about it and I'll bet you find VERY few who have checked this, or even know what the heck you are talking about! I have been checking my sales reciepts from stores and have not found one that uses 4 digit year. Of course they could be compliant and just displaying a 2 digit year but are they? How many stores do you know of that could stay open making change and keeping track of sales by hand until their POS can be fixed? David C. Hall Nov. 21 8:05AM 1997 Another interesting facet of retail use of computers is keeping track of inventory via data sent from cash registers (or at least computers used as cash registers). How many retail outlets have checked their inventory tracking system to find out if it is compliant? What would happen to a retail chain with several stores if they no longer knew exactly what they had left in inventory for a period of months? Also note that with the demise of training, many people just do blindly what the "computer tells them to do". If the computer said send back the last shipment of whatever because the shelf life has been exceeded, how many clerks would question that instruction? I fully expect that maybe one in a hundred. This type of problem has already started surfacing in several areas with a shelf life, such as chemical and pharmeceutical suppliers. I guess a collary question is; How many of you would expect to get the accurate change from a clerk at McDonald's if the cash registers were either wrong or down? *You might wanna print this out and take copies to your favorite stores you do business with!* ============================================================== Society for Information Management Year 2000 Working Group year2000.unt.edu Free, immediate registration If you're already registered, direct access to "embedded systems": year2000.unt.edu

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