[HECnet] DECnet-10 doesn't work past Nov 9 2021?

[Steve Davidson]

I know about the macro-11/RT-11 date. V5.x fixed it by adding an “EPOC” bit.  I have not looked at those sources in years but it shouldn’t be that hard to replicate. I “may” have the DECnet sources as well. I will have to look...

-Steve Davidson

SF:iP1

> On Jan 1, 2021, at 14:58, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 1, 2021, at 1:40 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> 
>> On 2021-01-01 19:08, Paul Koning wrote:
>>>>> On Dec 30, 2020, at 5:11 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Well, for another year from now, this isn't even being tested. Only on Nov 9, 2021 will the value exceed 32767, at which point things could potentially become funny.
>>>>> VMS apparently seems to just truncate at 15 bits, so it reports dates back in 1977 again after that time. But we don't know if that truncation happens at sender or receiver...
>>>>> 
>>>>> RSX should continue to show correct dates on events up until 2065, treating the value as an unsigned 16 bit value.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Since any kind of fixing will require changes in the code anyway, I do think the least intrusive change is to just adopt what RSX did, and use all 16 bits as an unsigned value, which means nothing really changes beyond that we continue as things are.
>>>>> 
>>>>> If I got things right, VMS might show and/or report dates back in 1977 again. Annoying, but nothing worse than that.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Tops-10 seems to currently do a BUGHLT, so that really needs fixing.
>>>>> 
>>>>> TOPS-20 is a bit unknown, but it might just report wrong dates.
>>>>> 
>>>>> RSTS/E? Paul, could you check? I would hope that maybe the last release/patches would make RSTS/E do the same thing as RSX.
>>> As shipped by DEC, it wasn't even Y2K compliant.  At least not the version for which I have sources; perhaps it was fixed in a patch I have not seen.
>> 
>> Hmm. 10.1A, which was done by Mentec somewhere close to the end of the 90s should probably have some fixes/improvements. Unfortunately, I do not have the sources, and I cannot even find any release notes for it...
> 
> RSTS itself was made Y2K compliant.  The issue is code in the DECnet kit, that's separate and I don't know that it was fixed.  The same goes for other random bits; for example the RT-11 based assembler shows wrong dates in the listing page header.
> 
>>> Recently I repaired the event logging code to fix this, and since I knew of the Nov '21 problem I changed it to use unsigned 16 bit values.  So it should be like RSX, good until 2065.  You can find the fixed version in https://github.com/pkoning2/decstuff in the "decnete" subdirecty.
>> 
>> Excellent!
>> And we really should try and put a comprehensive page together with RSTS/E patches and fixes...
>> (And I really should do that for RSX as well...)
> 
>    paul