The following was extracted by G1SMD from a recent email from G3RUH:


  The Acorn Risc PC And The Date Ranges That It Can Use:
  ------------------------------------------------------

It is well known that DOS, runing on IBM PCs, will only accept dates
between 1980-Jan-01 and 2099-Dec-31 when dealing with the question
'What is the date today?' when asked by applications for this
information. After 2099-Dec-31 there will be problems.

Certain flavours of Unix run out of steam in 2038. There is a
reference in The Software Practitioner, 1997-May/Jun, Page 1.
It says that it all goes wrong on 2038-Jan-19 at 03:14:08.
That, however, is only for systems that use 31 bits to represent
the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-Jan-01.

"Proper" Unix (and Acorn Computers since 1987 - including the new
Risc PCs) use centiseconds since 1900 and a 5-byte representation,
(40 bits) so they are monotonic until the year 2248.

============================================================================
  James R Miller, G3RUH                    Mailto:g3ruh@amsat.org
    Cambridge England               Stardate:  1997-Nov-25 [Tue] 20:24 UTC
============================================================================

