HOW TO SIDESTEP THE MILLENNIUM BUG ON THE M128

Although the clock on the M128 is officially "expires" at the end of 1999, there is a short-term solution which I worked out today (Christmas Eve) and which will keep you going until the question of leap years has been sorted.

The solution lies in a combination of resetting the panel and adding a five-line string-slicing program to the !BOOT file of your working disk.

To access the panel, you need the Welcome Utilities disk. Although you cannot alter the 19 of 1900, you can change all the other variables by means of the Shift and Arrow keys so that January 1, 1900 reads  as a Saturday, although - if you have a Z88 and check out the calendar - it was a Monday. The M128 doesn't know that, so we can switch it to Saturday. (If you don't have your Utilities disk any more, you will have to go through the *CONFIGURE routine and reset TIME$, as described in the Manual.)

Then type the following program into BASIC:

10 T$=TIME$
20 L$=LEFT$(T$,11)
30 M$= "20"
40 R$=RIGHT$(T$,11)
50 PRINT L$+M$+R$

Save it as "Y2KTIME". When you CHAIN it, the two string-slicing operations omit the figure 19 from the date, and line 3 substitutes the figure 20. Obviously a more elaborate program will have to be devised to cater for leap years, although theoretically the leap years in the 21st century should be at the same intervals as those of the 20th, following the four times table from zero to the end of the century. I all depends how accurately the M128 calendar has been configured to backdate to the beginning of the century. To be on the safe side, you might fix the end of February as the annual date for changing your battery pack.  Do try it and let me have any feedback via edburlang@aol.com.

Edmund