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Commodore World Top Tips - Upgrade to GEOS 2000 now!

Recently, an Associated Press article in our local paper got me thinking about the turn of the century. Specifically, how the year 2000 will affect me as a GEOS user.

The article addressed the concerns and problems of a computerized society where only two numbers represent the year. As long as the century stays the same, there is no problem. When a new century arrives many problems could occur. According to the article, Boeing Co. expects to have over 1000 workers correcting this flaw in its' own systems. Many other businesses will experience similar problems that may affect each of us. Credit card balances and phone bills are mentioned as possible victims of calculations out by 100 years. Unfortunately, the article did not state that the bank would give me one hundred years extra interest on my balance.

What this has to do with GEOS may be obvious now. Like all of these business computers, GEOS only allocates two digits for the year. Look in any info box and the file date looks like 12/29/87. Even the clock in my CMD FD-2000 uses this format. While we can't change the basic storage format of the date in the system, we can adjust the programs that use it.

The most obvious adjustment required is the Calendar Desk Accessory. This program will let you look ahead into the 21st century but if your date is set to 01/01/00 the calendar that comes up is January 1900. Upgrading your Calendar for the new millenium only requires changing two bytes. The following program will install the patch very easily. To use this patch program, copy the Calendar DA to a fresh, blank disk. This step is very important as the patch program works on the very first program on the disk in drive 8 and does no checking to see if it is the Calendar DA.

90 rem patch prog for geos calendar for 21st century default
100 dimz(256)
110 open15,8,15:open2,8,2,"#"
120 tr=18:se=1:gosub1000
130 tr=z(3):se=z(4):gosub1000
180 z(8)=2:z(9)=0:gosub2000
260 close2:close15:end
1000 print#15,"u1"2;0;tr;se
1010 forx=0to255
1020 get#2,a$:a$=a$+chr$(0)
1030 z(x)=asc(a$)
1040 next
1050 return
2000 print#15,"b-p:"2;0
2010 forx=0to255
2020 print#2,chr$(z(x));
2030 next
2040 print#15,"u2"2;0;tr;se
2050 return

This program works on the Calendar V1.2 from the Deskpack Plus collection (mine is dated 12/29/87 4:08 PM). If you have Calendar V1.0 from the original Deskpack (mine is 10/9/86 3:00 PM) you must make a change to the program.

Enter the program as above but enter line 180 as follows:

180 z(15)=2:z(20)=0:gosub2000

While most GEOS users likely don't use their systems for purposes that could cause million dollar mistakes, this little fix will make the 21st century less of a nuisance by eliminating the need to reset the Calendar date everytime you use it. Also, when you select TO PRESENT in the date set menu, the calendar will go to the proper century.

You may wish to rename your new Calendar to something like CAL 2000.

enGEOy!!!