Ahh Yes! The little fish still swim. Deeper and deeper and deeper.

Those wonderful little machines that we paid so dearly for those eons ago, 8 years on average costing a few thousand to get one that could do something useful.

Yes, those workhorse 286s. And then, I fondly remember the day, the great 386 came into our little lab. We could compile embedded could over night now, instead of need the process to run over the weekend! What a marvel they were.

What a wonderful playground for the Two Digit Bandit!

The Two Digit Bandit knows that you would never every think of getting ride of those expensive paper weights. Besides, they have been working fine all of this time. Doing our home inventories, dialing into our bank accounts, and running that tax software. Tax software, well who cares if that ran slow anyway. that just means you could delay sending in your tax underpayment. Yes, that is a good machine!

But we found out that this machine was a bit slow for the web. Undaunted, we just turned of those graphics, we did not have enough memory to see all the colors anyway, and looked at the text. And most of all, we got our eMail.

When we think about it, even a mailman does not need a 386 to delivery the mail, so our 386 does quit a fine job of getting the eMail from mom and grandmom. It does an even better job of ignoring the eMail from the kids in college. You know the ones that ask for money?

Croch-Echlin Affect

But now there are these two guys Jace Crouch and his bud Echlin that have discovered that sometimes, these little mechanical beasts of burden catch the Croch-Echlin Affect (cold). And the cure seems to be they need some buffer-in ( get it buffer).

We know that the older computers had this thing called ROM-BIOS and a bit of memory known as the Real Time Clock (RTC) that needed to be replaced with a brand spanking new one. The replacement would solve all of our problems with Y2K.

Well a few years after the manufacturer have sold all of these neat upgrades, we discover that not all RTCs are engineered equal. There are buffered and non-buffered.

Ok. Here is the first quote:

Specifically, the phrase refers to the time and date instabilities that will occur intermittently in the year 2000 and beyond on some personal computers and on some embedded systems.

Someday, you will turn on that workhorse of a computer and it will say, "Hi, today is June 1,1980." Or better yet, it will realize that it has been in operation for around 30 years and refuse to bootup and let you catch up on your eMail from the kids in college who have yet to decide what their major is. Maybe they should major in finance and stop bugging you for money.

Anyway, I digress. The non-buffered RTC computers will give you intermittent problems. I would think that a computer that has been working for more then 10 years is going to give you more than just intermittent problems. And it will be more than just figuring out the time of day!

Now for the coupe degras quote:

We have only seen TD on systems that have non-buffered RTCs, but this has occurred only on a small number of such machines whose BIOS improperly accesses a non-buffered RTC. Once again, this problem is rare, and occurs most frequently on older machines that were probably never intended to be used in y2k and beyond.

This is probably a truly true statement. I am sure that Bill and Intel never expected anyone to use any of their computers for more that ten years. How hard could it be to come up with either a program or hardware gadget that will make those ten year old computers, in these days a 10 month old computer is obsolete, a thing of fond memories?

If you are working at a company that is worried that their 286, 386, and 486 computers are going to fail because of Y2K, then you seriously need to look for another job. Because come the Year 2000 the computers will not be the only things that are not working!

The definition

If you computer comes up with random dates, then it could be Time Dilation caused by those Croch and Echlin guys.

But, if your computer boots up with the same wrong date, then that is a serious problem which might be cured by a shoot of BIOS upgrade penicillin, but should be cured by a Computer Replacement Surgeon.