David Randall writes ...
 
>I have been lured out of the shadows to ask what if any information
>has yet been made public by HP and other regarding Year 2000
>compliance for MPE and a number of utilities we use, I am contacting
>the various vendors in turn also but figured the Gurus here would probably
>already have the answers for those who might be a little slow coming back.
>
>The products I especially am interested in are :
>
>MPE/iX and NS , Image/SQL subsystems
>Speedware V5
>Speedware V7
>Suprtool
>Adager (I know Alfredo is out there!)
>Spinner
>Netbase
 
I cannot answer for the other vendors, but we have booted our
crash'n'burn machine to December 31, 1999 and then watched as it
rolled over to the year 2000.  All of the Robelle products ran fine,
although Suprtool does *not* collate dates in YYMMDD format.
 
Grant Ritchie wrote:
 
>Much of our software is inhouse and uses the good old TurboIMAGE/COBOL/VPLUS
>combination. Mainly we look to be opting to place bits of code into programs
>that check if a date, in YYMMDD format, is less that, say 300101 and if so
>assume it's year is >= 2000 otherwise it's 19xx. We are reckoning on having
>some other systems in place before 2030!! :-)
 
Grant makes no mention if internally they store their dates in YYMMDD
format.  If so, these dates will not collate correctly after December
31, 1996.  This has a lot of implications both for sorting and for
selection (e.g., if date-yymmdd > "961231"  will not return all
expected dates).
 
After doing informal surveys with our customers, we have decided to
not do anything special in Suprtool to support internal dates in
YYMMDD format.  The next version of Suprtool will support a cut-off
date for interpretation of yymmdd dates after the year 2000.  We will
probably default the cut-off date to 50 (i.e., 500101 will be assumed
to be January 1,2050, but January 1, 490101 will be interpreted as
1949).  We have enough feedback from our customers to know that the
cutoff date will have to be configurable, since the default of 50 does
not work well in a variety of circumstances.  We also expect to add an
option to insist that you *must* enter a full four-digit year with no
assumed cut-off date.
 
For more information on Robelle's plans for the year 2000, see our
year 2000 FAQ at:
 
     http://www.robelle.com/ftp/faq/g8
 
We'll also be keeping customers on support up-to-date via our What's
Up, Documentation? newsletter.
 
Cheers,
 
David      <[log in to unmask]>