The Linguist's Shoebox
Integrated data management and analysis for the field linguist
Year 2000 compatibility
The main year 2000 compatibility issue in Shoebox concerns date stamps. If you use date stamps, we recommend that you upgrade to Shoebox 5.
MS-DOS versions
Shoebox 1.2 and 2.0 store only the last two digits of the year in date stamp fields. For example, if you edit a data record on the first day of the year 2000, its date stamp will be 01/Jan/00 (if the date stamp feature is turned on). For many users, this is only a minor issue of readability. However, the date filter does not work correctly for dates after 1999.
Windows and Macintosh versions
Shoebox 3 has a serious problem with date stamps after the year 2000 that can cause data loss. Date stamp fields will have extraneous characters (output from an overrun condition). For example, if you edit a data record on the first day of the year 2000, its date stamp will be something like 01/Jan/100@#$ (if the date stamp feature is turned on). The extraneous characters can include end of file characters (also known as EOF, ^Z, d26, x1A). Shoebox ignores all data that follows an end of file character.
Shoebox 4 can have a similar problem, but only if your computer's date gets set wrong (to 2038 or later). On the Macintosh, this problem sometimes occurs if the date gets set to 1980 or earlier.
The year 2000 date stamp problem was partially corrected in Shoebox 4.01 for Windows (August 1998) and 4.02 for Macintosh (September 1998). It is fully corrected in Shoebox 5.
- Shoebox stores four-digit years in date stamp fields (for example, 01/Jan/2000).
- Therefore, the date filter correctly compares all dates.
- Shoebox correctly sorts date stamp fields, if you use the Date.lng language encoding file (automatically installed in the user settings folder).
- Shoebox automatically converts two-digit years in date stamp fields to four-digit years when it opens database files from older versions.