ITinfo: Dates To Remember

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Dates To Remember

Y2K isn't our only problem date

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Dates To Remember

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

The Year 2000 (Y2K) computer issue has received much publicity over the past year for the anticipated problem some computer systems will have in calculating 4-digit dates.

There are a few more potential date problems for computers:

July 1, 1999
The fiscal year 2000 begins for many organizations, including many state governments
August 21, 1999
Global Positioning System (GPS) calendars rollover. Early GPS systems only had at 1,024-week calendar. After this date, the counter resets from week 1,023 to week 0,000.
September 9, 1999
The date 9/9/99 was used by many early computer programmers to indicate the end of file.
October 1, 1999
Many governments will begin fiscal year 2000.
December 31, 1999
This is the date that indicated "never expire" on old IBM mainframe tapes.
January 1, 2000
Computer programs and hardware that store dates in 2-digit year format may think the date is 1/1/1900.
January 3, 2000
The first U.S. workday of the year 2000.
February 29, 2000
A leap-year day in a year evenly divisible by 100 (which aren't usually leap years). Details are posted in a previous article entitled 1900 Wasn't, But 2000 Is?.
January 1, 2001
The first day of the third millennium in the Christian calendar.
February 6, 2040
Early Macintosh date and time utility will fail to calculate further.
January 18, 2034
UNIX date systems may fail.
January 19, 2046
Amiga computer system clocks fail.
January 1, 2108
MS-DOS system clocks fail. This is 2^7 year's since 1980.
January 1, 10000
Y10K problem. 4-digit year calendars overflow
January 1, 29602
Windows NT file system fails due to date problems.
January 1, 29940
Current Macintosh systems will experience date calculation failure.
January 1, 292271023
Java clocks fail

How to figure when leap years occcur

Previous issues are on our website at http://itrain.org/itinfo/.

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/1999/it990128.html
updated January 28, 1999