Year 2000 Compliance Statement

The PMIS Image Processing Software program is designed to run under different versions of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system with Intel® processors. PMIS retrieves time information from the operating system, and manipulates the time values in the following ways;

PMIS displays a text representation of the date and time in a number of different places. Since the release of version 4.0.5, PMIS displays all time values in text form using 4 digits for the year.

PMIS stores the binary system value in the header of native image and array files, these values should be correctly interpreted until January 19, 2038.

PMIS does not perform time calculations using text representations. Binary calculations are preformed by the TIME command, the limitations of this command are well documented.

Background
Many organizations and individuals are concerned about the ability of their computers to correctly process dates after January 1, 2000. Although these concerns are usually associated with mainframes and large software databases, many people also wonder about the impact of the millennium change on their personal computers and software.

The Year 2000 problem is a result of how dates have been manipulated and stored by computer hardware and software for the last forty years. Because computer memory and storage systems were extremely expensive in the early days of computing, hardware and software designers frequently represented the year with a two-digit field (i.e., '85' for '1985'). This two-digit convention was already popular in the English language before computers were invented, and applying it in computer designs made more efficient use of valuable system resources.

Unfortunately, without modification, the two-digit date format cannot unambiguously process dates in two different centuries. Until recently, most computer hardware and software would automatically assign all two-digit dates into the twentieth century (i.e., year 'xx' = '19xx'). So, if left unmodified, the clocks on older computer systems may interpret the year '00' to be '1900.' Fortunately, modifications have been designed into most recent PC BIOS and operating systems to correct this error.

Year 2000 compliance of Microsoft Windows on Intel based machines is well documented. For more information visit the Microsoft web site.