Statement of Year 2000 Compliance

Spinal Cord Research Centre
Data Capture and Analysis Software

The only computations this software makes which deal with dates are comparisons (equality/inequality) of file modification times. File modification times on Unix, QNX or Linux are not affected by the transition to the year 2000. Their format, as defined, is valid until the year 2038, when the time in seconds since midnight Jan. 1, 1970, will no longer fit in the 32-bit signed integer field in which they're stored. As our software simply tests for equality/inequality of these times, it will continue to function, but many other parts of the operating system will not. It is expected that all Unix-like systems will have a 64-bit time field well before that deadline. Between now and then, these operating systems will undergo many revisions which will have a much more profound impact on our software than a simple change in size of the time field. It is our intention to keep up with these changes.

For the more immediate issue of the year 2000, most current Unix-like systems are compliant, or can be made so with simple updates. QNX 4.24 is fully year 2000 compliant. QNX 4.23 is year 2000 compliant, but it is recommended that an update to the "rtc" utility be installed to provide a software workaround to a hardware problem with the PC's real time clock. Details can be found at the QSSL web site. Red Hat Linux 4.2 and 5.0 are fully year 2000 compliant. See their web site for details. For other Linux distributions, any compliance problems should be fixed with recent updates. Check with your vendor for other versions of Unix you may be running.

SCRC WWW administrator: www@scrc.umanitoba.ca