Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem

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To: John Mansfield who wrote (84)	2/11/1998 6:44:00 AM
From: C.K. Houston	of 618

After researching the problem further, it's definitely possible for non-compliant firmware to trash a system despite the fact that none of the applications reference the date. Basically, when 99 rolls to 100, the operating system may or may not use an extra byte for the ASCII or EPCDIC representation of 00, thinking it needs to output 100. If it does, the overwrite may OR may not trash a critical function. Even if the overwrite doesn't occur, the system may take an exception indicating that a third byte is needed to represent 100 -- which may shut the system down. So without figuring out exactly what a given system will do, the outcome is a pure crap shoot. A colleague of mine who has written many, many such date applications in the span of a 30 year career (he said he could do that coding in his sleep), has no idea what his code will do. When he coded, it wasn't that he thought 2000 was far away -- actually, it didn't even occur to him to think about output storage in the 99-to-100 transition. ============================================================== Someone emailed the above to me, and I thought it would be of interest to you. Cheryl

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