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To Y2K or not to Y2K, that is the question!

Hello,

I had to do an about face and change my stance on "New Millennium or New Millennium - 1" as noted in my article titled "After Y2K where are we headed?". In the last few days of 1999 I developed the argument to prove that 2000 is in fact the new Year, Decade, Century and Millennium. It's simple... 1960 through 1969 is commonly called the sixty's decade. Extrapolate that naming convention to claim that year 0 through Year 9 is the first decade in this calendar (actually the same rationale applies to all other calendars).

To this, my friend Danny Thorpe, Senior R&D Engineer (one of the architects of Delphi) of Borland/Inprise then quipped "Then don't be surprised if you get a Happy Zeroth Birthday card... :P"

So I responded to him that when a baby is born it is zero years, zero months, zero days, zero hours, zero minutes and zero seconds old. The counting begins from zero! In the numbering system (no matter what the base) as soon as we pass the base-1 we rollover to an additional digit. We are in the new count. If you are one of our friends visiting our delphi32.com web site you will immediately recognize that I am also influenced by the traditional Pascal index counters that are zero based :-)

I hope that most of your system clocks have turned over smoothly already on Y2K. If you used Inprise products you would need very little luck. Inprise products were by far one of the most Y2K ready products! In fact Paradox (acquired by Corel from Inprise, was designed to calculate accurately all dates till year 9999!). It's interesting to read comments by a well known figure in the community, David Intersimone. Check out DavidI's articles in "A Sip from the Firehose" on 26-May-1996 and then on 2-July-1997.

Now lets go back a few days ago and seriously look at the future. Please write your predictions about software development, technology in general or anything else that you feel strongly about in our future.

Thank you.

Leo Singh
President InThink Corporation
Site Manager Delphi32.com
President AZ Delphi Users Group

(c) Leo Singh, 16-Jan-2000

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