Mentec, Inc. Computers & Communications Cover Letter for VAX-11/RSX V2.5A Year 2000 Ready Update AV-KS02E-TE Contents of This Kit This kit is a maintenance release for VAX-11/RSX Version 2.5, and contains corrections to be Year 2000 Ready. This kit should be installed using the VMSINSTAL procedure on OpenVMS VAX plat- forms. For those OpenVMS systems requiring it, the appropriate Year 2000 OpenVMS VAX Kit should be applied to your OpenVMS VAX platform. ________________________________________________________________ Table_1:__Modified_Images_______________________________________ File_______________Problem______________________________________ BCK.EXE Processed /CD or /RD switches incorrectly, and allow date specification of either two or four digits BRU.EXE File attributes processed incorrectly, and allow date specification of either two or four digits DMP.EXE File attributes processed incorrectly, and allow all file header information to be displayed as 4 digit years FLX.EXE RT-11 and DOS file date processing corrected MAC.EXE Update to V5.5, and correct list file heading PIP.EXE File attributes processed incorrectly, and allow date specification of either two or four digits RST.EXE Processed /BD switch incorrectly, and allow date specification of either two or four digits RSX$IVP.COM Include Y2K Test for PIP SYSLIB.OLB Updated Y2K routines FCSRES.EXE_________Include_updated_Y2K_routines_________________ Corrections The following sections describe the corrections incorporated into VAX-11/RSX V2.5A Year 2000 Ready Update. File system attribute format The VMS attributes ASCDATES and EXPDAT do not explicitly handle dates outside of the range 1900-1999 without inferring the century. To correct this problem, the creation and revision date information are now accessed using the VMS file attributes CREDATE, and REVDATE. Please refer to the Release Notes for the Year 2000 OpenVMS VAX kit applicable to your platform for more information on how these attributes (ASCDATES, EXPDAT) are affected. ODS-I Date storage The dates stored in the identification area of and ODS-I volume are stored as an ASCII string of the form "DDMMMYY". The "DD" represents the day of the month, while "MMM" represent three ASCII characters for the month; i.e. JAN. The year field is only two ASCII digits, and in order to accomi- date the new millenium, a strategy was implimented whereby the high order digit of the year would be incremented to the next character in the ASCII collating sequence for each decade beyond 1990. For example, the year 1990 is stored as "90", the year 2000 is stored as ":0", and the year 2010 is stored as ";0". This is interpretted by each of the utilities to allow for a full range of dates to be supported. Century Inferrencing Primarily, RSX displays years as 2 digit fields, although it allows explicit century specifications for input parameters, and some utilities allow switches to display four digit years in output. For the purposes of support, when years are output as two digits, they are to be inferred to be between the years 1965 and 2064. For input, all two digit years are assumed to be in the range from 1965- 2064, and users must specify four digits for those years outside that range. Utilities The following utilities have been updated to insure Year 2000 Readiness under all versions of VMS supported by VAX-11/RSX Version 2.5. 2 BCK.EXE - BCK has been updated to correctly process dates be- yond 2000, and include century inferencing for all 2-digit dates. The valid date range for 2-digit dates is 1965-2064, while four digit dates can expand the range from 1900-2155. BRU.EXE - BRU has been updated to be able to restore files created after 1-JAN-2000 and preserve the creation date. Pre- viously, BRU would always write a file creation date which was stored in the file's header. After 1999, the high digit of the year would not be compatable and would result in the attributes being incorrectly written. This has been corrected. In addition, the date parsing algorithm within BRU will accept dates with either two or four digit year specifiers. All years specified with only 2 digits will be assumed to fall into the range 1965-2064. DMP.EXE - DMP has been updated to display file header date information in four digit year format, regardless of either ODS-1 or ODS-2 file structures. FLX.EXE - FLX has been updated to display file date information correctly beyond the year 1999. MAC.EXE - MAC has been updated to Version 5.5, and the list file header will correctly display the assembly date informa- tion. PIP.EXE - PIP has been updated to be able to correctly handle files created or revised after 1-JAN-2000. After 1999, the date would be incorrectly interpretted for directory listings, and also when copying using the "/CD" switch. This has been corrected. In addition, the date parsing algorithm within PIP will accept dates with either two or four digit year specifiers. All years specified with only 2 digits will be assumed to fall into the range 1965-2064. An additional switch has been provided which will allow output to include four digit years on directory listings. The "/Y4" switch will force PIP to output creation and revision dates in four digit year format. 3 RST.EXE - RST has been updated to correctly process dates be- yond 2000, and include century inferencing for all 2-digit dates. The valid date range for 2-digit dates is 1965-2064, while four digit dates can expand the range from 1900-2155. SYSLIB.OLB - SYSLIB has been update to include the following new routines; ________________________________________________________________ Table_2:__Additional_SYSLIB_Entry_Points________________________ Entry_Point________Description__________________________________ $DAT Not changed, output date as DD-MMM-YY $DAT4 Output date as DD-MMM-YYYY $DATI ISO standard output as YYYY-MM-DD $DATS Output date as either DD-MMM-YY, DD-MMM-YYYY, or YYYY-MM-DD based on system setting. For VAX-11/RSX, this will default to DD-MMM-YY format. $CBDT4 Alternate for $CBDAT, to output 4 digits if ___________________the_value_is_greater_than_1900.______________ FCSRES.EXE - FCSRES has been updated to include support for the changed modules within SYSLIB. __________ Copyright ©1998, Mentec, Inc. 4