Re: No-Slot Clock

[a2mg@aol.com (TEXAS II - AppleWorks)]

> What exactly is broken and being patched?  I'm running P8 2.0.3, 

Jeff, the thing is, it's not broken. ProDos is currently designed to use years
0 to 99 only (see tech note #28 for Apple's guidelines). This 0 to 99 does have
the effect of creating a few Y2K bugs - for example, the wrong day of the week
after 2000 (which ProDos reads as 1900 + 00, not 1900 + 100). Glen Bredon,
author of ProSel 8 and 16, who has been absent from the Apple II scene for a
number of years and who recently released ProSel 8 and 16 as Public Domain, has
decided that suddenly we are going to switch to a 00 to 127-year (or higher?)
standard for ProDos. The main reason for this is so that ProSel will work for
Y2K without patching. (Remember we already went to a great deal of trouble to
fix these bugs on the application level, not only in Prosel, but for a large
number of other programs as well.)

So, we now have a patch to ProDos which very nicely fixes a lot of Y2K bugs,
although not all of them. In some cases, it's pretty wonderful. However, the
downside is that it creates a lot of new bugs in applications which obeyed
Apple's 00 to 99 standard. For example, AppleWorks 4/5. For another example,
any program which displayed the date as 01/01/00 and didn't truncate the year
to two digits now shows 01/01/100. I can fix AppleWorks 4/5, but I cannot fix
anything that is written in Pascal. (Not to mention the fact that I don't WANT
to fix any more stuff.)

So we're just sitting back and waiting to see what happens.... meanwhile, my
ProSel updates have been yanked across the board. For more details, join the
Apple II Mail Group at http://members.aol.com/A2MG 

Beverly Cadieux 
The Apple II Mail Group - JOIN at http://members.aol.com/A2MG