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To: E. Charters who wrote (86)	8/8/1998 5:06:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89

You know something else, the Intel people are not telling the truth that the yr2000 bug is adequately patchable. The timer interrupt gets its timer function from registers that records seconds passed from a BIOS routine after taking a count from a clock. Now that is microcoded in the chip how it stores seconds passing or cycles. To allow a larger number of seconds or a larger time period.. so that time will not, overflow in the "seconds" register you have to rewire the chip itself. So in essence it is a second "math" bug. You need to have a timer interrupt that uses more registers and allow a larger or 64 bit word size to be stored. Then you will never run out of time. If you simply rewrite the BIOS routine then the timer function may not work too well and it is used by many many programs for all kinds of things..even unrelated to time.. just for the sake of needing/using an interrupt.. They would crash if the values they got back from the timer routine were not what they expected. Windows would not even work. Legacy programs would all have to be rewritten.. So you see it is a bit of a thorny problem. How do you increase the stored word size of the timer without overflowing programs and taking too many cycles in the timer function? It has to increase as the year 2000 is stored as so many seconds past a certain date.. and 2^32 is only 136 years. EC<:-}