Desktop computers

It is well documented that desktop computers can suffer from year 2000 compliance problems.

To help understand the problems, and to work out solutions to them, it is useful to divide up desktop computer technology into layers - some hardware, and some software.

As can be seen, each layer can only drive the layer immediately below it, it cannot interact with any other layer.

So

• the user drives the application software

• the application software interacts with the operating system

• the operating system uses the services provided by the BIOS

• the BIOS drives the computer hardware

When considering year 2000 compliance, it is useful to amend this table of layers slightly, to show each layer that has to be made compliant.

In this set of layers, the user is replaced by the data produced by the application software, and the computer hardware is replaced by the real time clock, which is the only part of the hardware which is significant to year 2000 compliance.

To achieve year 2000 compliance on desk top computers, each one of these layers must be looked at, and corrected if required.

Each one of these layers is looked at in seperate web pages.

Please note that the following web pages only refer to IBM compatible computers, running DOS / WINDOWS.

Apple MAC users should zoom back to the Year 2000 index page for some good news.

PC`s running other operating systems such as Unix or Linux are also different - some of these operating systems can allow application software to directly access the hardware level clock output - no information as yet on this web site.

© 1999 Ron Turner

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