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This is bad news for people who think PC's have no problem. This story from FEDERAL COMPUTER NEWS (Sept. 22).
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Although many agencies assume new PCs will be Year 2000-compliant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently discovered that an order of 600 high-end computers failed to pass its test, and the group is now working with its contractor on an upgrade.
Most agencies are focused on testing older computers - 386s and early 486 models - but as NRC discovered, new Pentium computers may be vulnerable to the Year 2000 bug. . . .
NRC's PCs failed compliance testing due to the real-time clock used. A real-time clock is a chip that synchronizes the activities of a PC and keeps track of time. Some applications directly access the real-time clock for date-related information. A PC's BIOS also taps the real-time clock when calculating dates.
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