Tracy asks:

> While playing with Brian's timestamp question and KenH's nice Cobol samples
>  (and without reading any of the fine manuals, sorry), I explored a bit and
>  found that
>  2005/05/30 19:24:04 == +1117506244 ('time' result, 'timestamp' format(?))
>  2038/01/18 19:14:07 == +2147483647
>  1901/12/13 12:45:52 == +2147483648
>  which hints that 7pm Jan 18 2038 is when MPE discovers the edge of its
>  world.  For several years now I've thought I'd heard 2027; does this give
me
>  another 10 years to keep blissfully running MPE, or am I looking at the
>  wrong numbers?

The reason that the world ends in 2027 for MPE is that only 7 bits were
allocated for the year number (0 to 127), and the start year was defined to be
1900.

January 1, 2028 is thus the drop-dead date for the HP3000 (sort of). I
presume that the counter will simply roll over at that time and we'll all return to
1900 again, in our own special version of a time machine.

Wirt Atmar

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