OpenEuphoria

Re: Date Error in MS Works

• Posted by Joe Otto <joeotto at SWBELL.NET> Feb 22, 2000
• 645 views

A little sarcasm here and there doesn't hurt, right?  I tend to be a little
sarcastic by nature.  Microsoft was just the unlucky target this time.

Btw, Lotus wasn't part of Big Blue back then.  And it's not really a
user-entry error - *all* MS spreadsheets with dates contain the "error"
because it's built into the file format.  The dates are actually stored as
the number of days elapsed since 1-1-1900.

Joe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Euphoria Programming for MS-DOS
> [mailto:EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU]On Behalf Of Brian Broker
> Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 2:40 AM
> To: EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
> Subject: Re: Date Error in MS Works
>
>
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2000 21:14:14 -0600, Joe Otto wrote:
>
> >1900 wasn't a leap year, but an old, old spreadsheet that ran under MSDOS
> >called Lotus 123 thought that it was a leap year.  When
> Microsoft got into
> >the spreadsheet market, they continued the error for the sake of backward
> >compatibility.  Nice, huh?
>
> So are you being sarcastic (just another anti-Microsofty) or are you
> commending MS on realizing IBM's error?  I wonder how many MS spreadsheets
> actually contain this user-entry error (perhaps from an imported DOS-based
> Lotus 123 data file)? ... my guess, irrelevant ...
>