Year 2000 Conformity Statement For Gould Hainault Manufactured (Digital Storage Oscilloscope) Products and Accessories
The Scope of This Document
This document has been created in order to state Gould Instrument Systems' position regarding Year 2000 Conformity and how it will affect Gould Digital Storage Oscilloscope products and accessories, and our computerised business systems.
The Definition
The definition of Year 2000 Conformity is set out in the BSI document prepared by British Standards Institution committee BDD/1/-/3, "DISC PD2000-1 A Definition of Year 2000 Conformity Requirements", as written below:
Year 2000 conformity shall mean that neither performance nor functionality is affected by dates prior to, during and after the year 2000.
In particular:
Rule 1. No value for current date will cause any interruption in operation.
Rule 2. Date-based functionality must behave consistently for dates prior to, during and after year 2000.
Rule 3. In all interfaces and data storage, the century in any date must be specified either explicitly, by unambiguous algorithms or by inferencing rules.
Rule 4. Year 2000 must be recognized as a leap year.
The Statement
Gould Instrument Systems believes that its current range of Digital Storage Oscilloscope products and accessories meet the requirements set out in the above definition and are Year 2000 Compliant, for the reasons described below.
The Reasons
Rule 1. Any dates which the instruments use as the current date do not result in any interruption in operation of the instrument. The only problem which may occur is that of roll over from year 2000 to 2001 on the 1600, 2608, 4060, 4070, 4080 4090, and 600 range of oscilloscopes where, without user intervention, the date reads as 13/01/00, i.e. 1st day of 13th month, year 2000. However, if the date is set by the user to 01/01/01, i.e. 1st day of 1st month, 2001 the unit will operate correctly from then onwards.
Rule 2. Although the instruments may record the Date and Time of an acquisition, they provide no facility for date-based functionality. It is not intended that the time or date of acquisition be used for any purpose other than as an indication to the user in a log book. Gould Instrument Systems believes that its Digital Storage Oscilloscope products and accessories are not affected by this rule.
Rule 3. The internal clocks on Gould instruments typically operate with two digit date and year figures. However, DataSYS and Classic families of instruments label the data they collect with four digit date and year information using the following century inferencing rule. Figures from 00 to 93 inclusive are converted to years 20xx, and figures from 94 to 99 inclusive are converted to years 19xx (where xx is the two digit figure), the expected life-span of current instruments being well within the limits of this inferencing rule. Also Classic / DataSYS families (with software prior to version No. 1.25 for models 5000, 6000, 6100, 7100, 7200 and with software prior to version 2.01 for models 6500, 9500, 9500A) will display the year with three digits, 100 instead of 00 for the year 2000. Instruments which are not covered by the DataSYS and Classic families do not perform any conversion from the two digit year information of the internal clock.
Transition 2 will report the correct date for trace data which is labeled with date information between the years of 1971 to 2037 inclusive. Traces whose dates are labeled outside this range will report the following: Prior to 1971 will report 1971, after 2037 will report 2037.
FAMOS software interprets all data recorded after 1980 (DOS was introduced in this year) and up to the year 2079 correctly.
Rule 4. The Year 2000 is recognized as a leap year in all current instruments and many older instruments with the exception of the 400, 500, 600, 1600, 2608, 4060, 4070, 4080 and 4090 families of instruments which recognize all leap year rules except for the 4 century rule into which the year 2000 falls. (Normally the year at the start of each century, i.e. 1700, 1800, 1900, are not leap years even though they divide by four. Every four hundred years however, the year xx00 is deemed to be a leap year in order to correct for the three previous centuries). The date on the instruments will simply be incorrect by a day on the 29th February 2000 which can be easily reset by the user from within the date menu of the instruments concerned.
Current Range of Digital Storage Oscilloscope Products and Accessories
The list below shows the products covered by this statement. Although not all of these products are current (i.e. they may no longer be manufactured and sold by Gould Instrument Systems), it is recognised that this list includes the products which are most likely to still be in regular use by customers:
400, 405, 420, 450, 465, 475, 500
1602, 1604, 1624, 2608
4062, 4064, 4066, 4068
4071, 4072, 4072A, 4074, 4074A, 4082, 4084, 4090, 4092, 4094, 4096
610, 620, 4164, 4162, 630, 640, 650, 680
DataSYS 720/730/740/750/760/765/770/770A/ 840/940/944/944A /7000/7100/7200
Classic 5000/6000/6100/6500/9500
All interface modules, keypads, and accessories for any of the above instruments
Viewer, Transition2, ProView, FAMOS
Products Which Do Not Contain Real Time and Date
Please note that the following products do not have any real time or date associated with the displayed measurement, data output or operation and therefore will not have any problems performing to specification before, during, or after the Year 2000.
EasyScope 340
DWG7000
OS250, OS300 Families
OS1000, OS1100, OS1200 Families
OS2000 Families
OS3000, OS3150, OS3300, OS3500, OS3600 Families
OS4000 Families
1400 Family
HR2000 Recorders
4035 Model DSOs
Gould Multimeters
Timer Counters
Signal Generators (J, PG and SG types)
Power Supplies
Transformers