Y2K on Macs
The internal time maintained by the system is based on seconds since antiquity, which I believe is Jan 1,1904 (Not sure of the date, but it was some weird year in the 1900's. UNIX sets its time from 1972, which is when UNIX was invented). The original Macs (128k, 512k, Plus, SE) can go up to 2006 or 2017 (forget which). The newer ones go up to something like 2295.
Whether or not a given piece of software is Y2K compliant depends on the person who wrote the software. If dates and times are stored via calls to the OS, it'll be fine. If they rolled their own, it may not be. I used to run a big accounting app on our Macs called Flexware. It was based on a port of an old VAX database. At the time I ran it (about 10 years ago) dates were stored in the db in Julian form w/ 5 digit numbers, so 1/1/84 was 84001, and 12/30/94 was 94364. That is definitely not Y2K compliant. (I assume they now use 7 digit Julian numbers for dates.)
So, your general purpose apps written for the Mac should be OK, but anything that uses a proprietary database may not be.
-Russ |
