>A good example: I'm worried that shelters (and >readers) may find their own computers are not working properly in the year >2000. Will delays in retrieving information stored on your computer affect >a shelter operation? Quite possibly. The Y2K problem is only a problem with the large mainframe computers (which stored dates as only 2 compressed "characters" in order to conserve disk space). This is not a problem with our home based PC's where the year has been stored as 4 digits (there's other lists to discuss this on). However, even if you assume I'm totally incorrect, those of us with our own computers can control our system date. If you find out there's a problem, set the system date back to 1999, or up to 2999. You are NOT going to lose data because of this problem (on our home systems). Even my old DOS based database can be rapidly changed to add 2 digits to the year field. My shelter will continue to operate, we will not run out of Totally Ferret, my well will continue to produce water, and if necessary both my waste and my ferrets can be buried with a shovel, just as in the good old days! ;-) Sandi (ex-mainframe computer programmer who helped to cause the Y2K problem) Best Little Rabbit, Rodent & Ferret House Seattle, WA PS: It's easy to check all of your programs right now by backing up your files, changing the system date and run all of your programs. It's NOT easy to change the date in mainframe computer files/databases and hundreds of thousands of custom programs. [Moderator's note: As someone quite involved with Y2K compliance at work, and as a mainframe and PC programmer, I disagree. Nearly every PC we surveyed *failed* Y2K compliance -- the bios of most PCs were not compliant. Fortunately, many are upgradeable. And even once the bios is compliant, many operating systems are not. Many things would continue to work anyhow, of course, but in some cases programs would fail to run, or worse, data could be lost -- such as a database program deleting suddenly outdated records. Actually, our mainframes are in comparatively great shape -- it's the PC's we're all worried about! Macintosh computers have been compliant since day one by the way, though no guarantee that applications running on them are. I believe that the typical home computer is not compliant unless it is quite new. But I also don't think it will spell disaster -- a lot on your computer will continue to work anyhow. The point of the original post was a suggestion to be ready for emergencies, be they caused by fire, flood, or calendars. Other than that, it's pretty much not a topic to discuss forever on the FML. BIG] [Posted in FML issue 2366]