When the clock strikes midnight on 31st December 1999, a lot of computers could suddenly find themselves in a lot of trouble. The fact is that, until just a few years ago, the typical computer clock was programmed to show only the last two digits of the year in the date. This means that the indication of the century was not contemplated as it was enough to assume that it was the twentieth century. Obviously, with the turn of the century not very far away now, this is no longer the case. But when our typical computer clock reaches 23:59:59  on 31:12:99, it's probably going to tick happily over to January 1st....1900. Or is it?

In order to offer customers complete assurance as to the conformance of Olivetti EuroComputers products with the Year 2000, all PCs, servers, workstations and notebooks currently being shipped all pass NSTL's YMARK2000 test. All Olivetti EuroComputers PCs also comply with the Microsoft PC 98 standard for the Year 2000. 

NSTL IS ONE OF THE LEADING INDEPENDENT TESTING FACILITIES FOR THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY. FOUNDED IN 1983, NSTL PIONEERED THE USE OF OBJECTIVE, COMPARATIVE TESTING OF PC AND LAN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. IN ADDITION TO DEVELOPING AND ADMINISTRATING LOGO PROGRAMMES, NSTL OFFERS CUSTOM COMPATIBILITY, PERFORMANCE, USABILITY, BIOS AND COMPARISON TESTING SERVICES TO HARDWARE DEVELOPERS, SOFTWARE PUBLISHERS, GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND CORPORATIONS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. NSTL IS HEADQUARTERED IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA, AND IS A DIVISION OF THE MCGRAW-HILL COMPANIES. FURTHER INFORMATION ON NSTL'S SERVICES CAN BE FOUND ON ITS WEBSITE AT HTTP://WWW.NSTL.COM.

The Year 2000 problem can be divided into two areas:

1. Operating systems and applications
2. The hardware

The current Olivetti EuroComputers software applications choices loaded on the hard disk or bundled with each product, are all certified "Year 2000 compliant" by each supplier. For full details, please refer to the WWW site of the supplier of your operating system. The Internet addresses of the major operating system suppliers are given below for your convenience:

Microsoft:             http://www.microsoft.com/year2000
Novell NetWare:    http://www.novell.com/year2000/
SCO UNIX            http://www.sco.com
IBM OS/2             http://www.software.ibm.com/year2000/index.html

Please contact the supplier of each software application you use on your computer to find out whether it is YEAR 2000 compliant.

The hardware
The hardware problem basically derives from a piece of hardware (chip) called the real time clock, or RTC. This component is driven by the CMOS battery so the clock works and is continuously updated even when your computer is switched off. 

The RTC works with 2 digits for the year, i.e. 01/01/99. The first two digits (19) are memorised in the system's BIOS. The Year 2000 problem stems from this fact: the RTC's limitation in representing the entire year. If only the last two digits of the year indications are shown, then the year 2000 will be shown as 01/01/00, and the system will interpret this date as being 1900. 

A technical solution to solve the Year 2000 limitation has been introduced by organising the information flow that determines the year information, and reprogramming the BIOS so that it holds all four digits of the date. The BIOS memorises this, and other important information for the POST (Power-On System Tests) phase when the computer is switched on, and passes it to the operating system. In addition to this, new BIOS versions include a specific routine that checks and automatically updates the RTC more than 18 times per second. In this way the year count is always correct. As the operating system and programs interrogate the BIOS for the date each time they need it, and not the RTC, they will receive the correct date instruction. 

Who could be affected by the Year 2000 issue?
Today computers play a very large and important role in business and in the home. Companies world-wide will all have to face the century roll-over problem in some way. 

Any computer that has not yet been modified to cope with the transition to the new Millennium could encounter problems in the change. Computer functions that rely on valid dates to perform a task to facilitate business operations could be affected by this Millennium bug. In other words, anything that needs to use a date could be disturbed, and this could have a tremendous impact on any organisation where dates and automatic processing are handled via computers.