Data Fellows Confirms Its Products Are Not Affected by Year 2000, also known as Y2K problem

Many legacy applications use a two-digit ASCII representation for the year part of each date field in their internal data structures. While this conserves two bytes of space for each data stored in the system, it also leads to potential problems when the date reaches 2000, since the two-digit year "00" makes it impossible to distinguish between 1900 and 2000. Further, systems that use date fields with two-digit years will produce false results when comparing dates to see which one is earlier when one of the dates is after 1/1/2000 and the other is before that date.

Data Fellows has taken the problem into consideration and has verified that its products produce correct results both before and after year 2000. The solution used for the problem is the following:

• All dates are stored using an internal format which is independent of the presentation format. The internal format is a four-byte integer which does not have separate fields for the time, day, month or year.
• The internal format does not depend on the decimal digit system used for presenting years and other date fields in Gregorian dates. Therefore, there are no special turning points or milestones where the internal date would need any special handling. All date calculations are done with simple substraction or addition of two integers. This makes it easy to find the difference between dates, without any need to convert the dates during the process until they are presented to the user.
• The presentation format is used for displaying the date to the user. Normally, the format is defined by the settings of the operating system. For example, if the user specifies date format as "MM/DD/YYYY", the user sees dates with a four-digit year field. On the other hand, it is also possible to use "MM/DD/YY" if the user prefers that. This does not affect the results of any operations that are related with dates, since the presentation format is not used for anything else but showing the final result to the user. All Data Fellows applications will display dates using the internationally standardized four-digit date format "YYYY-MM-DD" provided that the user selects this format using the features of the operating system.
• On Microsoft Windows platforms such as Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT, the supported date range is from 1 Jan 1980 to 31 Dec 2037. On the Apple Macintosh and PowerMac platforms, the supported date range is from 1 Jan 1920 to 31 Dec 2019. Note that these ranges are not imposed by Data Fellows products but rather the operating systems which the applications depend upon. Therefore, these ranges may change with future releases of the aforementioned operating systems.