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There are an increasing number of articles in the press about the impact of the approaching millenium on the world’s computer systems. The problem is known variously as the ‘Millennium Bug’ or as the ‘Year 2000 Problem’ (Y2K to those in the know!). The problem is a serious one, but many of the articles are rather alarmist and contain little or no information on what is being done to overcome it. What are the problems? 1. The ‘Millennium Bug’ is the label used to describe the potential problems that virtually all computer systems will face on 1st January 2000. Most of the programs written which involve date-based calculations use the date format ‘DD/MM/YY’. Only two characters are used for the year and the computer assumes that the numerical value of the year date will increase with time. This will pose no problems until 31/12/99 becomes 01/01/00 when the later year date has a lower numerical value than the earlier one, thus affecting the logic of the program and resulting in incorrect results being returned. 2. Another aspect is that many programs have been written to assume that the year in which they are running starts with a ‘19’. This is fine until the year 1999, held as two characters (99), rolls over to become ‘00’. We know that a year specified as ‘00’ will mean 2000. However, to a computer program this could mean ‘1900’ or ‘2000’. This will lead to ambiguity, corruption and possible failure of programs. 3. A third problem associated with the year 2000 is that not all computer systems will recognise the fact that it is also a leap year. The rule is that a year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4 except for centuries, when the rule is that they have to be divisible by 400. 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 will be. Is AccountForce™ Millennium Compliant? YES! All AccountForce™ programs use the date format ‘DD/MM/YYYY’ for date entry and, therefore, are fully Millennium (Year 2000) Compliant. Internally, these dates are stored as the number of elapsed days since 1st January 1801, so there can be no confusion as to which year they represent! In fact, AccountForce’s dates will remain valid until 31st December 2099 - this gives us another 100 years to solve that problem! |
