Calendar date has naysayers seeing nothing but nines

• Feb 08, 1999

Year 2000 hucksters lately have begun proclaiming Sept. 9, 1999, as a day of doom.

They say computers will read the date as 9999—the hexadecimal code for “end
of file.”

Will 9999 prove to be a computer’s equivalent of 666? No, said Intel Corp.’s
Doug Steffen, who works on the chip maker’s PC motherboard team.

The real-time clock, BIOS and operating system in a PC or server will not read the date
numeral series as 9999, Steffen said. Instead, they will interpret it as 090999.