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Dan Bricklin's Web Site: www.bricklin.com
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Demo and Y2K
While not formally tested, Dan Bricklin's Demo and demo-it! should, in general, behave as expected on their OS's after December 31, 1999.
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Here is the answer I sent about Demo II and Y2K in response to a question from someone doing Y2K research for a client. There has been no formal checking of Y2K behavior for Demo and demo-it! as far as I know, but this information should be helpful. If you know of any incorrect behavior, please notify me.
I cannot speak for later versions of Demo II, only the original one. I don't know what features were added, and the programming was done by the owners of the code (rights to the Demo II code was sold right after the first version was shipped -- Software Garden and I have not been involved with the code part since).
As I recall, Demo II is inherently a product that is not date dependent, only timer-tick dependent (notice that all times are in 1/18 sec -- the hardware clock-tick) so normal operation should be fine. The original Demo II is a DOS program and uses DOS and BIOS calls for date/time information. It therefore has whatever problems any other DOS program would have if you use dates, times around midnight, etc. (I think DOS has a hard limit of bits for the year sometime in the early decades of the 21st century, but not at 2000 itself). If you use the Date value in Demo II you will get whatever obvious values the system provides through its (and Microsoft C's at the time of manufacture) libraries. Demo II itself, other than in one built-in function if there is one (I don't have the manual here) that returns the system date, only deals with time in clock-ticks since boot up, and that is only used to simulate delays, therefore should not be affected by any date problems. Since it has a programming language in itself, if you (i.e., your client or a programmer working on their behalf) programmed anything that uses date values either you provide or the system provides, each individual application written in it should be examined to see if they were coded correctly. This would not be a problem with Demo II, but rather with their programming. I know of no applications of Demo II that were written this way, and it is not the intended use of the program, but any product that has a programming language built-in gives the purchaser a chance to introduce bugs in their final application.
I would suggest that your client just set the clock to 2000 (before and after Feb 28), and check the operation of their application written in Demo II. If they encounter any problems, please let me know.
I hope this is helpful.
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With respect to demo-it! for Windows, its programming language has no date items. Everything is in fractions of a second (usually milliseconds). The same statements about underlying operating system apply. Remember that it is a 16-bit application, so some time intervals that grow in size will wrap around. Y2K should not change this behavior.
Unless Programmers Paradise has done some tests, I know of no specific tests conducted to check how it operates as the clock turns over Jan 1, 2000. I have not received any complaints from users that have conducted their own tests.
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© Copyright 1999-2018 by Daniel Bricklin
All Rights Reserved.
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