[Coco] Y2K fixes ever developed or posted?

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 14 December 2003 12:51, jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
>On 13 Dec 2003 at 21:45, Alex wrote:
>> On Dec 13, 2003, at 7:01 PM, Dave Kelly wrote:
>> > Microware did not fix the Y2K problem in OS9 until version 3.1
>> > or 3.2.
>>
>> In reality, the OS itself doesn't have a problem with y2k, though
>> most utilities which use the date do.  OS9 uses a single byte for
>> the year with the epoch being 1900, the year 2003 being
>> represented by the value 103 or 0x67.  Unfortunately the date
>> command only accepts two digit decimal dates.  Some commands will
>> end up printing the year as 103, some as 67, and some as 19103. 
>> On top of that the support for many clock chips do have y2k
>> problems.
>
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Many of the clock chips designed in the 80's did not have a century
> byte. So in implemting a RTC in software that was never done
> either. Many of the RTC chips store the year as a packed BCD byte.
> The century byte is hard coded. That essentially made them Y2K
> noncompliant. Newer RTC chips have the century byte.
>
>A correction to the OS soft clock would be to setup a global
> variable for the century byte in packed BCD format along with the
> year byte. That way the century byte is not hardcoded in the
> software. Or just use one of the newer RTC chips.
>
>james


Unforch, the architects of OS9 did not leave room in that 6 byte field 
that contained the hex version of the date/time for a carry bit, or a 
century byte.  So we had, at least for os9-6809, to cobble up 
something that would work until the coco (and all its friends) was 
well and truely dead.  OTOH, there was no reason the year field  byte 
couldn't contain a value above $63, so we used that in most of our 
fixes.  Those are good till 2079 in my fixes, by which time I'll 
probably be in the ground for 70 years or so (if I'm lucky that is)
After that, well,,, shrug.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.