I am a civil engineer, so I don't know a lot about embedded chips, except for what I've read over the last 12 months which is at least 600 hours. Now I believe you can set DCS, PLC, EMS and other control systems clocks to roll over to the year 2000 early and thus see how they react. But what about embedded chips with epoch dates burned in at the manufacturing of the chips. I know of no way that you can manipulate the time measuring codes in the software of these hardwired chips. Am I all wrong on this? How many of these chips are there in power plants that don't keep time by communicating with a hardware clock somewhere? These chips will roll over to their own Year 2000 when they are good and ready in my opinion.

-- Anonymous, February 08, 1999

Answers

While I'm just an applications programmer...

I have read some posts indicating that for those chips with date "burned-in", unless the date is used externally, the date is not guaranteed to be correct. The chip will "roll-over" at some point - but not on the "real" calendar.

-- Anonymous, February 08, 1999