OT: patenting an old year/date concept, to make millions

Jerome Fine replies: My Netscape did strange things and attached everything as a file. For those of you who can't or have decided to not open files, this is just a repeat. I guess some people will try anything. I did a contract job back in 1998 for a company who wanted non-Y2K compliant software to use the DATE/TIME chips on a computer board for a PDP-11 to READ the DATE information and interpret the 2 digit year correctly. Fortunately, the firmware for the DATE/TIME chips rolled over from "99" (for the year - kept as a BCD quantity in two 4 bit hardware registers) to "00". Since RT-11 (I know - I can't get away from it) has 1973 as the earliest legal date, I wrote the software to assume that any year value less than "70" was after 1999. In addition, back in 1993 or maybe 1994, I patched the code for the actual RT-11 OS (V5.6 of RT-11) to do the same thing. This was not the standard that was finally adopted for V5.7 of RT-11 wherein any date after 1999 was required to specify a four digit year, but it is very obvious that many other people were already using the concept of a pivot date long before 1998. I also modified some software for a company that makes cars (you know those big hunks of metal with four wheels and a nut in the front seat) - I think that was delivered in 1997 and those patches also used a pivot date concept. So I doubt that it will take much to prove that granting the patent was "inappropriate". Anyone else have any stories about using a pivot date some time ago? Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine