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Chapter 0
Overview
Thank you for purchasing Iwill DPIILS2 motherboard This operation manual will instruct you
how to configure and install the system properly. It contains an overview about the engineering
design and features of this product. Also, this manual provides useful information for later on
upgrade or configuration change. Keep this for your future need.
YEAR 2000 issue
The IBM compatible PC utilizes a Motorola MC146818 compatible Real Time Clock (RTC) chip
to maintain the date and time. Unfortunately, the “century” is not manipulated by the RTC. It uses
8-bit of information to report the year and can only hold the last two digits of a year in packed
BCD format. So 1997 is reported solely as 97. Since the RTC also contains non-volatile memory,
IBM specified a location in the memory to hold “century” information. By combining the century
data with the year data, software can obtain a full 4-digit year. When the Year 2000 occurs, the
RTC reports the year as ’00’ and the “century” in RTC memory will contain ’19.’ Combining the
full 4-digit year yields 1900, not 2000. Any applications which compares dates, or uses relative
dates to perform functions will see an incorrect dates.
Motherboards contain BIOS, which is one of the key ingredients to check for systems designed to
handle the year 2000. All motherboards currently shipped from Iwill contain BIOS capable
of handling the year 2000 date correctly. The BIOS contains a feature that checks the least two
significant digits of the year stored in the RTC during each BIOS request (INT 1Ah) to read the
date and, if less than `80', updates the century byte to `20'. This feature enables operating systems
and applications using the BIOS date/time services to reliably manipulate the year as a four-digit
value.
Be aware that the BIOS capability alone does not ensure that the system will handle the transition
correctly. Other system components such as the operating system and application software also
need to be able to handle the year 2000 date and recognize the date format from other pieces.
