W hen examining Y2K readiness at your site, there are of course several general areas you need to examine.

O ne of the first should be your operating systems. In case you have not already discovered this for yourself, you can rest assured that OpenVMS is fully prepared for the century change. OpenVMS versions 7.1 and 7.2 are Y2K-compliant as currently shipped with no changes, while others may require kits readily available from Compaq. You should check with your Compaq representative regarding your specific system, or you can visit Compaq’s Year 2000 OpenVMS home page at All information is available there as to which versions will need kits and how to obtain the kits.

W hen examining your own systems and applications, there is a quick, simple way to check for Y2K-compliance:

a) Carefully back up all the data on a computer.
b) Some time outside normal production hours, change the computer’s system date to December 31, 1999 at 11:55 PM.
c) Observe the computer as the date ticks over to January 1, 2000 and note whether it continues to function normally.
d) After the date ticks over to the year 2000, try shutting down the computer and seeing if it will boot.
e) One at a time, run each of your production applications as if you were doing the normal processing that is done on that computer and note whether the application functions normally or not.
f) For any application that fails, obtain a fix from the vendor of that application or find a replacement application that is Y2K compliant.
g) Set the computer’s clock back to present time.

F or those of us who don’t develop software for sale or consumption, or don’t develop our own applications, this is a simple approach and one which, if followed, will result in a computer which is extremely unlikely to suffer from “the Y2K problem.”

F or others who find that their software must be examined closely in order to make code changes, there is an excellent guideline published by Compaq which the Digital engineers followed to examine and make any necessary changes to OpenVMS and layered applications. Called “Guidelines for Year 2000 Code Investigations,” it can be found at . When examining and handling Y2K problems, remember that, with any OpenVMS system, you should remove distractions such as performance problems. This will make it easier to handle Y2K problems distraction-free. Diskeeper and I/O Express take care of basic performance problems (fragmentation and disk I/O bottlenecks) for you, so you should make sure they’re on all the OpenVMS systems at your site.