Chapter 4

Journal Entry June 28th

I finally finished my initial read-through of “The Annotated C++ Reference Manual” and am currently ‘digesting’ it all. I’ve been writing simple programs in my head, building upon the old with each new section as I finished it. I’m going to take a few days and enter my ideas into the compiler to see if they work as intended, and to learn from my mistakes.

I’ve discovered that I can clearly envision each line of code, its purpose, and the outcome based on data that I provide with a thought. I have already created a program capable of searching through code written in FORTRAN and COBALT. It can find every instance where two-digit year formatting is used and update them to the four-digit year format. I’m going to make it so that each correction must be accepted by a human operator at the keyboard using keystrokes, no mouse input. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for changing dates from ‘87 to 1987 when it actually was a historical date outside of the Twentieth Century. Not very likely to happen, but why take chances.

The next piece of programming that I intend to write will run on any computer and OS when I finish it. I am designing it to create an invoicing database with mock historical data that mimics a bank or utility’s records. Once the database is completed, the program will reboot, and a screen will come up requesting that the system BIOS date/time be changed to December 31st, 1999 at 23:45 (11:50PM for the rest of you). Once that is done, and the system must be rebooted again. After the reboot and login are completed, it will wait for the date to change from December 31, 1999, to its new date. It will then start calculating billing based on the previously created database and the current system BIOS date.

The program’s purpose is to show how each computer will handle the problem of never getting to January 1st, 2000, but instead rolling back to the system’s baseline date. In the case of your typical PC, that rollback will be to the early 1980s. At the same time, SUN and Unix Systems will roll back to sometime in 1963, or so - I cannot recall the exact dates, as it has been decades since I worked on the original problem. In some cases, this kind of date change will block access to the files entirely, while in others, it will create massive bills based on the difference between the new date and December 31st, 1999. Even if a bill for $100 only rolls back to 1983, that’s sixteen years of interest compounded along with fines and fees which get rolled into the debt and add to the interest being charged. Keep in mind, no payments are being calculated, so the debt only increases and never sees any reduction.

I hope to get both programs fully sussed out and ready to go to market by Graduation.