Subject: A Report of Y2K Events in the Department
 
 There was as little excitement here in the Department as there was all over
 the state, country and world over Y2K. We monitored all central servers on
 New Year's Eve and over the midnight period, but there were no catastrophes.
 We did have some programs and scripts that exhibited strange date reporting.
 Specifically, some scripts that Steve wrote using the PERL language, reported
 the year as 19100. The PERL documentation stated that the localtime()
 function would return an array of strings, the last of which was supposed to
 be the year as a two digit number. Actually, the last element of the array
 turned out to be the year minus 1900, and therefore became '100' instead of
 '00'. Another affected program was ELM, the program many people use to read
 their mail when logging into the chemistry Unix server.
 
 Several older computers dedicated to instrument-control/data-collection that
 could not be upgraded to a more recent version of their respective operating
 systems simply had their clocks turned back to the year 1971. At midnight,
 these computers therefore rolled over to 1972, instead of 2000. The year 1972
 has the same calendar as the year 2000, and it is the oldest year that fits
 this criterium to which computers of this type can be set (these computers
 record the date as the number of seconds since Jan, 1, 1970, AKA the 'epoch'
 in computer circles).
 
 We will continue to look for minor gliches. If you discover any problems,
 please report them to support@chemistry.ohio-state.edu as always.