Jim Swanson wrote: > > Information system managers are all abuzz about the millenium. They have > looked into the future, and forecast widespread disaster for the year 2000. > > You can forcast the fate of your own system by setting the clock to 11:55 > p.m. on December 31, 1999, shutting down for ten minutes, and re-booting. > > When you alter a file, what date does the system assign to the change? If > you sort newly-altered files by date of change, how do they stack up? If > you have a spreadsheet or accounting program, how many days does it say > have elapsed between records that span the centuries (which really don't > change until 2001, I know). > > If you use an accession or catalog numbering system that uses the last two > digits of the year, will you now start over with 00?<< SNIP out some MacSmugness>> Dates in almost all spreadsheets are stored as the number of days since some arbitrary day in the past (for example Excel for the MAC uses 1-1-1904; for the PC 1-1-1901) these dates are stored as floating point numbers. The century change will have little or no impact. How you format and present those names will. The DOS date function is a lowlevel system call stored in BIOS. WINDOWS and WIN 95 both know and understand dates past the millenia. In native DOS there is no provision for setting a four digit date, programs and functions exist to do this. -- Andrew J. L. Cary, Senior Curmudgeon, Cary Consulting Services E-Net: [log in to unmask]