tut%cairo@Sun.COM (Bill "Bill" Tuthill) (01/11/90)
A friend of mine is a Chiropractor who uses a DOS program on her IBM PC-clone machine to handle her practice. The program is called "Chiropractic and Insurance Management System" and has served her well for the past several years. Last year, the company which produced the program went out of business, ending any support or future upgrades for the product. At the time, I reassured her that that was no big thing, as the program was running fine and should serve her faithfully until something better came along. Well, last week she accessed the program to prepare an invoice, and the program will not allow her to input "1990" as a valid date! I suspect that the originators of the program put in some kind of hidden code to insure that "pirated" copies of the program would have limited usefulness since they would effectively terminate on 1/1/90. They probably never anticipated thet they would not be around to "reset" or "reissue" the program to valid customers. I'm trying to find out if someone out there is enough of a hacker to go in to the program, find the code pertaining to the 1989 limitation, and "tweak" the code to allow continued usage of the program. Who ever said life didn't present enough challenges....? --George Kautzman (408) 276-5246 sun!namaste!george or george@Ebay.Sun.COM