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To: Yorikke who wrote (22527)	11/3/1998 2:35:00 AM
From: bill718	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116762

Re. Y2k: True, many PC's will be in good shape come 2k but what about the millions of micro-controllers out there in various control systems including those used for power generation, natural gas distribution, water, etc.... The potential for the controller to believe the maintenance interval has been exceeded tremendously (for example) is great....therefore invoking safety procedures causing disruptions. Of course power and telecommunications disruptions have the potential to affect the financial sector (along with nearly everything else) temporarily, so even if the operating systems and software are compliant, they are still in trouble if the disruption is prolonged beyond the capacity of UPS systems. Interesting read supporting this point of view at: techstocks.com My bet is that POG will increase significantly next year....cause nobody really knows for sure what is going to happen with y2k. Regards, Wayne

To: Yorikke who wrote (22527)	11/5/1998 1:52:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116762

PC's are well known to be compliant or approximately so. There is a workaround in the date thing. But a lot of big installations with DOS 3.1 software like insurance companies may get spreadsheet blues. It is one thing to do a calculation routine but another to get a date entry problem. People think they have it solved. But try running the software as of that date and it may be different. The IEEE has identified 1800 varieties of chips that are non compliant with Y2K. They power a lot of industrial equipment in assembly lines power and heating control systems and elevators. The 6809e and the Z80B are two major control chips used in a lot of boards in Ontario Hydro and other remote sites and they are not compliant. They have not been tested for error conditions in many situations. It will all in all be a most interesting time. It is mostly non-UNIX mainframe* and non converted industrial controllers that will suffer. But that is 70% of the large scale computing power that runs society. *UNIX and Linux are stable until 2038. The Canadian Forces have researched the matter in Ottawa with a lot of controller boards currently used and they announced last week a major deployment disaster plan for the event. They are not kidding. It was not a bureaucratic decision but a research conclusion. The forces will deploy at that time. It is alot more expensive to change a plant than people think. All boards measure time and date and make reports. In a mine plant these days there could be several hundred Z80B Gould controller boards worth about 2500 a piece. You cannot reduce the number of boards with redesign as they have to be physically at each machine they control. A new board with a more modern processor is no boon. They could not afford to go to 486 or 686 architecture as everything now is 8 bit or 16 bit bus and the Intel chips are fraught with math bugs (4 in the last year and half) and cannot be trusted to do BCD or other floating point crunching. They run PC's but don't use them for simulations. (The Z80 was used because it could be accurately timed for real time applications in sampling and could be easily programmed from the trained base.) I would estimate that you are looking at several million per plant to unpgrade. Some people think that a controller board does not care about the date. Sure. It is trivial to query it and get an out of date report. But what about register overflow? Induced register overflow is one way people break into computers remotely. People forget that time in computers is counted by seconds and accumulates. Hey but what about the F00F bug? EC<:-}

To: Yorikke who wrote (22527)	11/10/1998 1:51:00 PM
From: RagTimeBand	Respond to of 116762

**OFF TOPIC** mnmuench >>I develop and sell software. Most of the machines I've tested using standard Y2K tests are compliant. I don't see a lot of my clients being forced to buy new systems. Even the 486's I've tested are compliant.<< I don't know if you're familiar with the stories about the "Crouch-Echlin Effect" or not. So this is FWIW: ....It all began with Crouch's decision more than a year ago to set his office computer forward to Dec. 31, 1999, to test how it would handle the transition to the year 2000. The rollover happened without a hitch, even though the machine ran on a clone of Intel's aged 286 microprocessor chip -- a relic from the mid-1980s. Since Crouch was using the computer for word processing in which the date is logged made no difference, he decided not to change the date back. But to his consternation, during the next two weeks the computer's clock jumped ahead to December 2000. Other odd malfunctions cropped up... While some testers reported computers jumping ahead for minutes or months, others said they experienced leaps backward, while on some machines the clock appeared to simply slow down. Some afflicted computers were unable to locate the pathway to outside phone lines or even their own hard disk, making it impossible to fire up programs. "The jury is still out on exactly what is happening," said Douglas de Lacey, who oversees computer systems at Cambridge University's School of Arts and Humanities in Britain and has reported encountering the Crouch-Echlin Effect on two aging Toshiba laptops. Pressure for a verdict is building, though, especially since a recent, widely distributed e-mail announcement from COMPAQ'S YEAR 2000 OFFICE in Albany that said the company would be RESELLING THE SOFTWARE FIX fix created by Crouch and Echlin. Becker said that he was being peppered by anxious calls from major clients like General Motors and Exxon asking what they should do. If the Crouch-Echlin Effect is real, computer users may have to spend billions of dollars testing and possibly replacing equipment that seemed ready for the next century... So far, the Crouch-Echlin Effect has only been observed in computers with "nonbuffered" real time clocks, a design not used in today's name-brand computers but common in older devices... In the case of a nonbuffered real time clock, the BIOS chip will see the electronic equivalent of a red flag for 244 microseconds before the update is to occur. Seeing this flag, the BIOS waits briefly. If the flag is not there, the BIOS figures it has enough time to complete its reading and proceeds to do so. All this works fine until the computer reaches the year 2000, according to Echlin. After that, he says, computers with nonbuffered real time clocks may trip up if an unlucky user turns them on at the wrong instant in the update cycle ... "They make a very solid argument," said Jeff Floyd, a real time clock specialist for Motorola Inc., the giant semiconductor company that manufactured the real time clock chip on Crouch's computer.... Complete post at Message 6345872 Regards - Emory

To: Yorikke who wrote (22527)	11/10/1998 2:35:00 PM
From: C.K. Houston	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116762

<I develop and sell software. Most of the machines I've tested using standard Y2K tests are compliant. I don't see a lot of my clients being forced to buy new systems. Even the 486's I've tested are compliant.> <Talk of disaster is, in my opinion, a bit over blown. It makes a good hustle, the naive can be scared by technical jargon into spending large sums of money, but in reality most people have about as much chance of a major problem as they do of dying from the plague.> In Nov '97, 600 brand-new 200 MHz Pentium computers purchased by NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) ... FAILED Y2K roll-over test. You might want to re-test your computers with most recent testing software. NRC & NASA computers intitially passed Y2K roll-over test. They re-tested with updated testing software. That's when they ALL failed. It was an RTC problem. See following: Message 2833670 "Dallas Semiconductor readily admits that the real-time clocks used in the NRC PCs are not compliant. The company has been manufacturing chips with and without a 'century counter' that provides Year 2000 compliance, said Jim Lott, senior product manager for Dallas Semiconductor's timekeeping group." "The noncompliant clock, which cost 60 cents less per chip, is contained on the board manufactured by EliteGroup. Lott said the differerence appears small but makes a big difference to volume manufacturers when they buy components." NASA: 72% PC FAILURE RATE ON Y2K ROLL-OVER TEST "A check of 61 PC models at NASA's Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, determined that 72 percent are not Year 2000 compliant ..." fcw.com FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEKLY Cheryl