Dealing with Year 2000

The Year 2000, or the the so called Millenium Bug, has been hyped up into an enormous issue, with a lot of scaremongering and forecasts of forthcoming disaster.

Unfortunately, most of this mis-information is coming from people and businesses trying to make money out of general ignorance and lack of understanding about computers.

In reality, the world is not very likely to end at midnight on 1999-12-31, and most of life will go on as normal.

The following pages contain information which should help to inform, and thus enable a realistic attitude to the situation.

• Why there is a problem

• Writing date and time

• Where does the year 2000 problem exist

1) Embedded systems :

• Introduction to embedded systems

• Which equipment has embedded systems ?

• Public domain and work environment

2) Desk top computers :

• Year 2000 - compatible or compliant

• Introduction to desk top computers

• The real time clock

• Interaction between the RTC and BIOS

• BIOS

• Testing PC`s for compliance

3) Does anything escape ?

• Good news for Mac users

© 1999 Ron Turner

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