Statement of Year 2000 Compliance

Last Updated: Wednesday, May 12, 1999

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The information on this page is subject to change without notice. MFM provides it "as is" and without any warranty. Any risk arising out of the use of the information on these pages shall remain with the reader. In no event shall MFM Communication Software, Inc. or its subsidiaries ("MFM") be liable for any direct, consequential, incidental, special, punitive or other damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption or loss of business information), arising out of or in connection with the availability or use of the information contained in these pages, even if you have advised MFM of the possibilities of such damages.

What is the Y2K Bug?

The Year 2000 Problem (or Y2K bug) affects computer software that represents dates using only the last two digits of the year. (For example, a computer program might represent the date: April 2, 1973 as: 04-02-73.) Many programmers took this shortcut to save computer memory. However, after the year 2000 arrives, computer programs will begin interpreting dates with a 00 year as being in the year 1900 instead of the year 2000. The solution is simple in principle: a programmer must search through a program to find all date references, and change them to represent the year with a full four digits. In practice this can require a lot of work, as programmers must search through millions of lines of code to find all references to dates, and then they must test all their changes.

The Y2K bug affects mostly software running on larger mainframe computers. Much of this software dates from the 1970's and 1980's, and the original programmers did not expect their programs to continue running for three or more decades. Personal computer software has far fewer Y2K bugs because most of it is fairly new. Most of the programmers writing software for personal computers have been aware of the Y2K bug for the past several years, and they have taken care to represent years with four digits when storing dates and doing arithmetic on them.

PC Access for Windows

Only two functions in PC Access manipulate date information. Only one such function (the sendtoday script command) has a Y2K bug, and this occurred only in an older version of PC Access. This particular bug can affect only a tiny subset of PC Access users: those who use the sendtoday script command in PC Access scripts they write automatically, and those who use it indirectly via the Send a Date Relative to Today dialog while recording a script file. For these users, the bug manifests itself only while PC Access runs a script containing the sendtoday command; otherwise PC Access runs normally after January 1, 2000.

• Amortization Window
  • MFM has thoroughly tested the Amortization window and found it to have no problems involving dates in or after the year 2000.
• sendtoday script command
  • PC Access 4.00 and 4.10: The sendtoday command was not in PC Access versions 4.00 and 4.10, so users of these older versions do not have this problem.
  • PC Access 4.20 : The sendtoday command had a problem in PC Access 4.20 Builds 120 through 124. MFM corrected the problem in a non-public beta release and carried the fix forward to later builds. The current build of PC Access 4.20 is Build 132. PC Access 4.20 Build 132 is Y2K compliant. You can download an update to Build 132 from: Download PC Access for Windows Version 4.20 Build Updates.
  • PC Access 4.30: MFM has carried forward the sendtoday fix in all Builds of PC Access version 4.30. If you are using version 4.30, the sendtoday Y2K problem does not affect you.