OT: patenting an old year/date concept, to make millions - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 Nov 1999

Tim Shoppa Replies:

...
 Jerome Fine replies:
 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. 
This was fixed in RT-11 5.7, it now consistently handles 1972 through
2099, inclusive. 
Thank you... I was about to respond to Jerome that if it did do
that (and I didn't know it did), I would have considered that to be
a bug which would require fixing, not programming around...

I suspect that the check should actually be made for the day field of
the date word being zero as being invalid... the year can be 00, the
month can be, too, but the day field should always be non-zero for
a valid date. (though I've always had a problem with why the months
field was 0-11 instead of 1-12 when the day field was 1-31).

					Megan Gentry
					Former RT-11 Developer

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