DOS ain't dead

dggionco Buenos Aires - Argentina, 02.03.2024, 20:33	Future time bug in MS-DOS (Miscellaneous) Post reply
	Many computer systems measure time and date as "Unix time" and have the year 2038 problem (Y2K38 bug). In native/real/true/pure MS-DOS 6.xx, is there a similar time bug in that year or some other future?

Laaca

Czech republic,
02.03.2024, 21:06

@ dggionco

Future time bug in MS-DOS

Post reply

Time bug in DOS will be in year 2099 because of the limitation of FAT filesystem.

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DOS-u-akbar!

mceric

Germany,
02.03.2024, 21:53

@ Laaca

Future time bug in MS-DOS

Post reply

> Time bug in DOS will be in year 2099 because of the limitation of FAT
> filesystem.

FAT timestamps use a 7-bit Value for the years since 1980, so you could reach 2107. However, Windows 3 needed a bugfix for the file manager because it would even display all years after 2000 wrong otherwise ;-)

Note that FAT timestamps can only encode even seconds, so a file cannot be timestamped 13:53:31, only 13:53:30 or 13:53:32.

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

dggionco Buenos Aires - Argentina, 03.03.2024, 11:40 @ mceric	Future time bug in MS-DOS Post reply
	Luckily, the time bug in MS-DOS is not imminent, and most likely it will not affect us. I didn't know that MS-DOS could only encode even seconds. Many times I wanted to change the date and time of some files with Total Commander 6.58 for W3.x (https://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm) and I couldn't put odd seconds in them. Thank you very much Laaca and Mceric for your explanations.

Future time bug in MS-DOS (Miscellaneous)

Future time bug in MS-DOS

Future time bug in MS-DOS

Future time bug in MS-DOS