Rumor has it that Jerome Fine may have mentioned these words: Anyone else have any stories about using a pivot date some time ago! Jerome Fine <<<< To bring this on-topic, I used that technique back in the mid-late 80's in all of my software that I wrote (for myself mind you...) in Basic09, under OS-9 on my CoCo2 & 3. I made & packed a routine to do that automatically, then just linked in the code with the routine with any program that I wrote that needed that functionality. I'm not bragging... I'm sure there are a *lot* of folks here that figured that out a lot earlier than I did. It's really not brain surgery, after all. That guy needs to be slapped... Hard... in the face... with a frozen mackerel!!! ;-) (that's a quote from a guy on my Model 100 list... so that's even on-topic! ;-) See ya, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig. If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.

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Jerome Fine replies: Perhaps you missed the emphasis on "legal" in the "earliest legal date" with regard to the DATE command which will not accept 1972 (e.g. 01-Jan-72). In addition, some of the code in RT-11 in the monitor and elsewhere rejects a date value with a year value of zero - meaning that 1972 is considered invalid by that code. On the other hand, DIR has been coded so as to display a date which includes a year value of zero or 1972 after the bias is added. Which is why I used a pivot value of 70 (or 2070) so as to be sure to avoid any possible conflict for the DATE/TIME hardware clock on the third party board. Any idea how the 11/93 does the 1999 transition with the now Y2K compliant firmware update? When I started to modify RT-11 (many years before Mentec as well), I adopted essentially the same procedure that you suggest above. That was done about two years before you did V5.6 of RT-11. I also extended the DATE command to accept all four digit years from 1973 to 2099, essentially the same as the value output by IND using a four digit year for which I adopted the symbol DATEXT. In IND, I also added TIMEXT which provided the time to the nearest 10 milliseconds. It might also be helpful to note that while it is possible to allow "00" to "71" to represent "2000" to "2071" in the DATE command, that is not possible in utilities such as DIR and PIP where there might be confusion with the "day of the month". Since DIR and PIP are forced to reject vales between "01" and "31" as a year, perhaps you also, as I chose, decided to reject "00" to "71" completely and required all years after "99" to have 4 digits. I also did V5.4G of RT-11 for most of the utilities (DIR, PIP, LINK, LIBR, MACRO and BUP) along with the monitor (RMONFB and KMOVLY) and the tape device drivers. The spooler and things like RTMON.REL did not seem to be worthwhile, so they were postponed. Note that Y2K compliance for V5.4G will stay as a paid for offering until Mentec places versions subsequent to V5.3 on the hobby list (as opposed to Compaq who has now placed most if not all of VMS on the hobby shelf) or at least for a few more years or until there seems to be sufficient hobby interest. Originally, I expected to offer V5.3 Y2K patches this summer, but as my time was taken up with commercial work, that did not happen. And since I received less than 5 inquiries about that possibility, it seemed not worth while in any case. I am still interested in doing Y2K patches for V5.3, but it will not be possible to complete them by the end of 1999. However, if anyone is really interested, SHOUT! Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine RT-11/TSX-PLUS User/Addict Present RT-11 Developer (unofficial of course - that means that anything I do is usually ignored by almost everyone else)