Year 2000 compliance has been a hot topic of discussion lately, and rightly so. Questions continue to flood in regarding year 2000 compliance. And, with recent pontificating by the NWSA at its Spring Management Conferences, we felt it’s time to restate our position on this problem.
THE YEAR 2000 PROBLEM
As you’re probably already aware, most software developed prior to the late 1990’s stored only 2 digits for the year in its date fields, and assumed the 20th century. However, with the coming of the 21st century, software changes would be needed to store the date with the appropriate century information as well.
In addition, the handling of leap year in February, 2000 can also be a problem. Official leap year calculation rules state that leap year occurs in every year that is evenly divisible by four (2000/4=500 even, IT IS), except in years divisible by 100 (2000/100=20 even, IT ISN’T???), except in years divisible by 1000 (2000/1000=2 even, IT IS AFTER ALL!!!!). As you can see, leap year calculation is quite bizarre and is perhaps the “overlooked” factor in the year 2000 issue. In fact, many “day-of-week” and “days between dates” routines will calculate incorrectly and cause, among other things, bank vaults to stay locked and elevators to not run due to the incorrect notion that it is the weekend instead of a normal week day.
INFONETICS POINT-OF-SALE/ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE YEAR 2000 COMPLIANCE
INFONETICS, Inc. has resolved all known year 2000 software compatibility issues within its SCO Unix based Point-Of-Sale/Accounting software effective with version 2.19, first released in the summer of 1997. This included modifications to all date handling routines, including data entry and display, and internal storage of dates.
To implement the century digits, without unnecessarily burdening the user with typing the extra two digits in every date field, the system was programmed to assume a century running from 1950 through 2049. Simply put, that means any date that ends in the digits 50 through 99 refer to the 20th century, while dates ending in 00 through 49 are the 21st century.
To verify that your system is running version 2.19 (or later), simply log on and notice the version number and release date displayed in the INFONETICS banner.