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has anybody seen the retail package of IBM DOS 2000?

I did; we'll see what happens.

I wonder if the PC-DOS 2000 package wasn't sold as an upgrade from DOS 7 around the time of the Y2K brouhaha.

Most Lenovo laptops include a DOS 2000 license.
 
I remember PC-DOS 2000 being marketed as a Y2K-compliant DOS, but I don't remember if it was sold both standalone and as an upgrade. It's been a while, and of course by 2000, there wasn't a lot of interest in DOS. Maybe less than there is today...

When I was doing Y2K work, my employers in that timeframe were using "DOS isn't Y2K compliant" as an excuse to get rid of old DOS boxes. I think some people didn't want to know about PC-DOS 2000.
 
Not to hijack this thread, but was there ever a bigger load of bull than the Y2K fiasco? Of all my pc's, laptop's, pda's and whatevers, the only thing I've got that that wouldn't comply is my old Tandy 100 laptop - it stops counting at 1999. Maybe Prince would like it.
 
Depends on what you mean by "bull". Compared to the usual government fiascos, it was pretty mild. Didn't kill anyone and some old COBOL programmers made some money.
 
It most definitely was overblown, because there were a lot of people spouting off about it who didn't have any ability to really understand the problem. I saw a lot of hucksters make a lot of money by working people into a panic. That said, both of the shops I worked in during the 1998-2000 timeframe found problems and fixed them, well before 1/1/2000 in most cases.

I believe Y2038 is going to be a bigger problem, and I'm afraid Y2K de-sensitized a lot of people to it. But part of the reason Y2K wasn't a bigger problem was because so many critical systems run on Unix, which has a Y2038 problem and not a Y2K problem. And that was part of what the masses didn't understand.
 
Agent Orange said:
Not to hijack this thread, but was there ever a bigger load of bull than the Y2K fiasco? Of all my pc's, laptop's, pda's and whatevers, the only thing I've got that that wouldn't comply is my old Tandy 100 laptop - it stops counting at 1999. Maybe Prince would like it.
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You lack a basic understanding of the Y2K problem.

Nobody really cared about whether a PC, laptop, PDA or watch would figure out how to roll the date over correctly. The bigger problem was in the millions of lines of old COBOL code that only used two digits for the year. If left uncorrected, that code would think that dates in the year 2000 or greater were earlier than all of the dates processed by that code so far. Bad things happen when your bank software tries to go back in time incorrectly.

Getting the banks, power plants, phone systems, and other infrastructure corrected so that it could deal with the rollover gracefully was a multi-year effort by every large corporation and government entity. The fact that it went so well shows how thorough the testing and preparations were.
 
mbbrutman said:
You lack a basic understanding of the Y2K problem.
Click to expand...
And ironically the M100 didn't care anyway; its internal calendar only uses two digits for the year and the century is hard-coded, so a simple patch to change the '19' to '20' and hey, presto, "Y2K compliant"!
;-)
 
In commercial applications, Y2K was pretty nasty. Oftentimes, you couldn't change the format of the data record to use 4 digits for the year and you had to be able to read the old tapes (Yes, tape was being used for archives), a number of schemes had to be adopted, some less awful than others.

If one could identify identify old tapes from the new ones, the simplest thing was to change the representation of the data, say from PIC 99 to PIC 9999 COMP-3. Or you could assume that dates before, say, "30" represented 21st century dates, but that was dicey when it came to, say, a person's birthdate.

The issue was that every line of code needed to be vetted; most of the COBOL people I knew of spent hour after hour going through crufty old code, not writing new stuff, but just reading.

It got nasty when the code was really old and no accurate copy of the original source remained. I recall one situation where a customer was running 7080 COBOL with 7080 Autocoder patches under emulation. Said customer had the tapes of the original COBOL source, but none of the patch code.

And it wasn't just COBOL; there were still RPG programs being used, as well as PL/I and other languages that one doesn't run into today. DIBOL, for example.
 
UNIX has a similar issue with the year 2038; apparently that is when 32 bit dates run out. The new 64 bit dates, however, won't run out for billions of years. :)
 
mbbrutman said:
You lack a basic understanding of the Y2K problem.

Nobody really cared about whether a PC, laptop, PDA or watch would figure out how to roll the date over correctly. The bigger problem was in the millions of lines of old COBOL code that only used two digits for the year. If left uncorrected, that code would think that dates in the year 2000 or greater were earlier than all of the dates processed by that code so far. Bad things happen when your bank software tries to go back in time incorrectly.

Getting the banks, power plants, phone systems, and other infrastructure corrected so that it could deal with the rollover gracefully was a multi-year effort by every large corporation and government entity. The fact that it went so well shows how thorough the testing and preparations were.
Click to expand...

I understand the problem just fine. You're looking at it from a programmer's standpoint. It may have effected the banks and such, but for the average consumer, it was just another ploy to to get into your pockets for a pc or laptop upgrade. Yes, people did care that their machines wouldn't keep the proper date. I was working for a "government entity" at the time (Treasury) and no sweat was lost over the thing, especially when January 2, 2000 rolled around.
 
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Chuck(G) said:
FWIW, my copy of LIST (from the late Vern Buerg) displays this year as ";1". It doesn't bother me.

Is there a 32-bit version of LIST?
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No idea, but if you fine one, post it up :) I, for one, would still love to find a registered copy around somewhere (it was one of a handful of programs that I never had the money to register as a teen, and sadly, can't register now)
 
Maverick1978 said:
No idea, but if you fine one, post it up :) I, for one, would still love to find a registered copy around somewhere (it was one of a handful of programs that I never had the money to register as a teen, and sadly, can't register now)
Click to expand...

I do have a registered copy (way back when and I never saw a reason to update, nor did I ever receive the upgrade offer email. Sigh--too late now).

Although Vern's buerg.com domain registration has lapsed, the Wayback machine still has his files for downloading here.

There is a guy who's got a beta of a 64-bit LIST.
 
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