Year 2000 Issues for Microcomputer Operating Systems

Hardware Support for System Dates

Handling of 4-digit years

Apple Macintosh

All Mac OS date and time utilities have correctly handled the year 2000 since the introduction of the Macintosh computer. The original date and time utilities (introduced with the original Macintosh 128K computer in 1984) used a long word to store seconds, starting at January 1, 1904. This approach means that the last date that can be represented correctly is 6:28:15 A.M. on February 6, 2040. The current date and time utilities, documented in Inside Macintosh: Operating System Utilities, use a 64-bit signed value, which covers dates from 30,081 B.C. to 29,940 A.D.

Microsoft Software

MS: "Since all Microsoft products actually store, retrieve, and calculate yearly data using 4-digits, the real Year 2000 readiness issues are more about user education than product warranty. We will continue to provide detailed information to customers about year 2000 readiness, but contractual warranties specific to Year 2000 readiness are not appropriate given the true nature of Year 2000 issues in personal computer software. Warranties for Microsoft's products are set forth in the end user license agreements (EULAs) that accompany the products and we recommend that customers read those warranties to understand their rights. The information we are disseminating about year 2000 readiness should not be misconstrued as constituting a further warranty for our products."

Note that different hardware implementations of "IBM-compatible" PCs may have BIOS implementations that do not handle the transition to the year 2000 properly. See http://www.microsoft.com/cio/articles/year2000faq.htm for more information.

Novell