Down to the year 2100

Theo Hupkens

The year 2000 finally has arrived. You probably are not interested in how many seconds ago the millennium change occurred. So you can safely delete all programs that count down to 2000 from your hard disk. I am pretty sure that you and I will not be able to celebrate the next millennium change. In fact, I doubt if the computers of the year 3000 will even resemble our current computers. If humanity still exists, it is possible that computer knowledge and computer power will be transferred to the human brain through radio (or other?) waves.

Personally I am more interested in the year 2100. It seems so much closer to us, although not many of us will be able to reach it. It also is a magic year (three times seven centuries). It is an interesting experiment to see whether programs that were created in 2000 will still exist and work well in 2100. This depends amongst others on the development of the operating systems.

For this experiment I decided to "update" my out of date millennium counter. It now counts down to the year 2100. Unfortunately, for some reason I will not be able to check this program at its final countdown moment. So I am asking you to keep this program alive during at least one century. For this purpose I have placed the executable on my web site for downloading; please do so and try to run it once and a while, especially if you have borrowed another computer or operating system. And please ask your children to continue this experiment. I am sure that the first person who shows that the program still works in 2100 (if it counted down correctly) will get some attention of the press.

This program is designed to work with Windows 95 or higher.

Download Delphi countdown program (MS Windows 95 or higher) and help it stay alive (155 kByte)

Read paper on how to make a count down program in Delphi.

Of course it would be nice to do the same experiment for different operating systems that run on other types of processors. So if you can write such a program, please distribute it through the internet! The result of a Java script (independent of the operating system ?) is shown below.

Still seconds to go to January 1, 2100.

You won't see the counter if your browser does not support JavaSript. For the JavaScript source: see source code of this page.

NOTE The Delphi program does not know about daylight saving time (add 3600 if you run the program during the daylight saving period). If the browser knows in which time zone your computer resides, the Java interpreter may correct for any daylight saving time changes (IE5/Windows 9x does this). However, if either the current date or the final date is far after the creation of the operating system, I doubt if such a correction can be trusted.

Last modified: August 16, 2000