Do you remember the Y2K panic? Do you remember all of the work that was required to get computer systems compatible with the change in Century? Were you grateful you used a Commodore?

Well, here's the news. GEOS on a Commodore uses the same 2 digits for a date as all of the big systems that you read about during the Y2K panic.

Some GEOS programs rely on the date so they are affected by the change in Century as well. One of the more obvious ones is the Calendar program. While you can change to any year in the 21st Centruy it would be nice to have the Calendar open to the correct year right at the start. This is possible by changing only 2 bytes in the program.

The patch presented here was published in Issue #10 of Commodore World Magazine in October 1995. I like to be proactive.

This patch will work on V1.0 from the original DeskPack (mine is dated 10/9/86 3:00 PM) as well as V1.2 from DeskPack Plus (mine is dated 12/29/87 4:08 PM). To use the patch copy your Calendar program to a freshly formatted 1541 floppy disk. If you are using a 1581 there is a comment on line 120 of the program telling you how to modify the program for use with a 1581.

Line 180 and 190 contain the code for the different versions of the Calendar program. If you have V1.2 then the program will work as listed. If you have V1.0 then you should delete line 180 and remove the REM command from the start of line 190. Once you have made these changes to the program just RUN it and it will modify your Calendar program. 

Load GEOS and then run your newly patched Claendar program. It should open to the 21st Century. If you set your GEOS clock to the time and date before running the Calendar program it should open to proper month. Month forwards and backwards through the different months to make sure it works properly.If you select the "To Present" option under the CHANGE menu the calendar should open once again to the current month and year. If this all checks out you are ready to copy this version of the Calendar to all of the disks that you have the Calendar on.

enGEOy!