Re: Sorry if you crashed (W95 FYI: Chaos in 2038!)

On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Rick Maas wrote:

> David Perrell wrote:
> > 
> > I'm glad to say I found the problem: In the course of a HD upgrade my
> > system clock had somehow built a 100-year bridge to the 21st century
> > and was set to 2096. Subsequent testing shows that dates beyond 2038
> > cause many unwanted side effects in Win95, including the aforementioned
> > crashes when NS Mail receives a message so dated.
[...]
> 
> Hell, I didn't just crash, I had to uninstall and re-DL netscape ... I
> hope nobody else had to do the same .... @ 14.4 .... but my blood
> pressure is back to 120/80 again ;)

You can both probably thank Microsoft for your problems. Apparently when
writing their C compiler, they committed a serious error that causes
*MANY* applications compiled with it to crash and burn for dates in the
second half of the next century. I first ran into the problem when
installing a UnionWay program that lets me view and type Japanese on my
otherwise English version of Win95 (a good program by the way - quite
worth the investment). After some rounds on the phone with the UnionWay
tech support - they remembered having seen this before with bad system
dates. I checked - sure enough, my system date was set to 2096. 

-- 
Benjamin Franz