Years remain until latest MPE date concern
July 12, 2010
The HP 3000's operating system is turning the pages toward a day when it will need date repairs. But the far-off approach of 2027 won't even be a concern to the most seasoned MPE/iX shop for a few more years to come. Allegro Consultants president Steve Cooper said that contracts and maintenance agreements will take a few more years to run into a bug similar to the Y2K issues of a decade ago.
The MPE/iX shortfall will take place sometime in 2027, when the 3000's internal date representation runs out of bits and wraps." Our report on the Ametek Chandler Engineering Group's plan to run a 3000 until 2023 sparked a warning about 3000 dates from MB Foster's Birket Foster.
"The date issue will happen if a loan or mortgage is put into the system that has a due date past the 2027 mark," Foster said, or a contract, warranty or best-before date. "You have a date this will happen in your application -- if is just a matter of your date range of your planning and activity. It is only 17 years away."
Cooper and Foster both know that date representation issues have been addressed by the 3000 development community before -- in an era when many companies were still engineering for the system. Cooper, however, sounded confident that if any 2027 date repair is needed, it will be available on time.
Cooper can sound sanguine about the issue because his partner Stan Sieler has engineered date repairs for the 3000 during Y2K work at the end of the '90s. Allegro sold a Y2K utility as part of its 3000 development toolset. "If anyone cares by then, one will need to do remediation similar to what was done for Y2K," he said. "Each program will need to be inspected for vulnerabilities, then fixed to use an alternate method of date storage and manipulation."
And, yes, as you suspect, this could arise before then. If, for instance, you are manipulating contract expiration dates in your COBOL program, and are using a 2027-sensitive format, then you will not be able to correctly handle any date past the 2027 cut-off.If you don't mind, though, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this issue for another several years. Remind me again toward the end of the decade, and I'll ask Stan to look into it. If I ask him now, I will lose a few months of productivity out of him, while he solves next decade's problems.
The issue is not limited to the HP 3000, even though the 2027 date is unique to MPE/iX. Unix has got the same kind of deadline approaching 11 years later. Cooper pointed to a Wikipedia article that explains the "Year 2038 problem" as an analogy to the 3000's.