Doom II.
One of the greatest sequels of all time, to one of the best games of all time.
But this video isn't about Doom II, it's about a compact disc slipped inside my Doom II box
which goes by the name of Y2000 Diagnostic.
Now, I think as the 20th Century came to a close, the Millennium Bug Watchdog Taskforce
2000 (nothing like a short concise name chaps), negotiated to get these discs slipped into
the odd software package so that you could test your PC.
Either that or someone just popped this in here for no apparent reason.
But in any case, I thought it would be interesting to fire this program up and see what it makes
of 2017.
The Y2K Bug has been present in an IBM PC sense since IBM launched "Big Blue" back in
1981, where the Century byte.
i.e. the 19 part of 1999 is hard coded and doesn't roll over with time, meaning that
when January 1st 2000 rolled over, the CMOS Real Time Clock would see it as January 1st
1900.
Now operating systems can be updated to accommodate this, but if the PC is off during the roll
over for example and then boots, an older version of DOS may see the Real Time Clock
set to the year 1900 and reset it's own date to 1st April 1980, which is the earliest clock
date it can handle.
This could cause CONFUSION, PANIC and ALARM.
But anyway, I'm getting sidetracked by details which are inconsequential.
Now we know that any modern day PC will pass these tests fine, so this is more to see what
the program looks like and how it tries to determine if there's a problem.
Initially, I attempted to run the disc on my Windows 10 machine, but even in compatibility
mode, Windows just isn't happy with running a 20 year old 16 bit executable.
So, the next call was onto my Windows '98 machine.
Now this DELL unit was actually made after the year 2000, so there should be no issues
here whatsoever.
The disc doesn't autorun, but the Windows executable opens up this rather dire looking
scaled image, telling us it "Takes only 5 mins to diagnose and fix the Millennium Bug",
alongside this rather strange disclaimer...
"This product has been developed in good faith, blah, blah".
Essentially it looks like a visual basic application cobbled together by a nine year old.
Anyway, it tells us the PC needs to reboot 3 times.
So I clicked Yes here, but then I think it had an issue with my screen capture software
and threw a blue screen of death.
Once the PC finally rebooted however, we're quickly thrust into this DOS program which
has been tucked inside the boot routine.
I think this is essentially changing the clock time, and waiting to see what it ticks over
to.
It then changes it to a few seconds before midnight on the 31st December 1999 and reboots
to check if the BIOS rolls over the correct date outside of the operating system.
Once Windows comes back, bingo, we're presented with a report telling us the tests were successful.
It makes me wonder who was up at midnight as the millennium rolled over, checking their
PC.
I think I was probably in a ditch somewhere.
With hindsight, I think I'd rather have been checking my PC.
You can't run any Fixes as apparently we haven't got the software anyway.
So that headline of "only 5 mins to diagnose and fix the Millennium bug" is a bit of a
stretch, especially if you have to order and wait for the repair software to come afterwards.
So, I thought we'd try the DOS version as well on my Compaq Prolinea 4/100.
It's a 486 from around 1995 so it's pretty give or take as to whether it will pass.
And this time.
Shock.
We encounter several problems.
As you can see, both the Real Time Clock and BIOS will fail to rollover successfully if
the system is on, although DOS manages it fine.
Even worse, if the PC is off (perhaps the owner was out celebrating), then all rollovers
will FAIL.
This is heavy stuff.
Now at this point, if I had the fix, then it would essentially install a memory resident
program that would launch on boot and act as a middle man between the OS and the Real
Time Clock, replacing the century byte with a 20 rather than a 19.
But that requires precious DOS memory which I need for games, and also I can just set
the date to whatever I please and the machine will continue to work fine regardless.
Interestingly though, I did find that HP still has drivers and downloads for this aging machine
on their website, having acquired Compaq back in 2002, and they had their own Y2K test program.
Unfortunately my PC was apparently too old to run it, but it's interesting to see the
ROM date of 29th July 1994.
It's too old to flash update, but I thought I'd run the BIOS setup program.
And wow, what a treat this is for a 1994 BIOS setup.
Unlike most IBM compatibles, these compaq machines store their BIOS configuration program
on a hard drive partition.
I don't have that partition, but I was able to create some boot disks to do the job.
This is obviously a more recent setup utility than the age of the machine, but still, even
for the late 90s, it's pretty darn snazzy.
Most PCs just had a crappy DOS like interface.
But whilst we're here, we are able to change the Real Time Clock settings, which roll over
fine if the machine is on.
But reboot it, and indeed you can see the date reverts to 1st April 1980.
This is the date embedded from an early DOS beta.
Thankfully from here, we can set the current date.
Reboot the machine, and VOILA!
Job's a good'un.
So what have we learnt here?
Well, we've learnt that my Compaq 486 will screw up if it's off when the millennium passes.
But that was 17 years ago, and it's easily fixed.
What else have we learnt?
Nothing, not a god damn thing.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this fruitless look at an old Y2K utility, I certainly did,
because I love it.
Thanks for watching.
Subscribe if you like, thumb it up, share it or even contribute to keep my channel going.
In any case, thank you for watching and have a good, and Y2K bug free, evening!