NEXTSTEP 3.3 And the Year 2000 Creation Date: July 14, 1998 Keywords: NEXTSTEP, 3.3, Y2K The following is Apple Computer's statement regarding the Year 2000 compliance of NeXTSTEP 3.3 applications and the NeXTSTEP operating system. For Year 2000 information on other Apple Enterprise software products such as OPENSTEP and WebObjects, please see our Year 2000 white paper at http://enterprise.apple.com/y2k/. 1. The NeXTSTEP 3.3 operating system is not Year 2000 compliant. NeXTSTEP 3.3 contains known Year 2000 problems, including problems with the date command and the Preferences application that may make it impossible to set the date on your computer after January 1, 2000. Customers using NeXTSTEP 3.3 should upgrade to OPENSTEP or MacOS X-based solutions. Please contact your sales representative for sales and pricing information. 2. The only framework in NeXTSTEP 3.3 which performed explicit date-handling was DBKit, the predecessor to Apple's Enterprise Objects Framework. DBKit did not handle dates in a Year 2000-compliant fashion, and therefore any application which makes use of DBKit is likely to experience Year 2000 problems. 3. NeXTSTEP 3.3 did not have an equivalent to the OPENSTEP 'NSDate' object; most applications and frameworks used UNIX utilities and functions to manage dates. These UNIX constructs and any custom date handling an application performs may experience Year 2000 problems. For this reason, the applications that shipped with NeXTSTEP 3.3 may not handle the Year 2000 transition properly, even if they are run in an OPENSTEP environment. Your custom NeXTSTEP applications will run in an OPENSTEP environment only if they do no date handling, or if they were specifically programmed with custom Year 2000-compliant date handling routines.