All TAL software products are fully year 2000 compliant.

Bar Code Software Products

Our bar code software products, including B-Coder and our Bar Code DLLs, are designed purely for generating bar code graphics and have no features at all relating to date or time values. Therefore, the year 2000 issue is not relevant to these products in any way whatsoever. If a user happens to be encoding date values in a bar code, it is their responsibility to ensure that any date values entered for a bar code message are in an acceptable format for their particular bar code application.

Data Acquisition Software Products

The SoftwareWedge products (including WinWedge Standard, WinWedge Pro, DOSWedge, DOSWedge Pro, TCPWedge, BC-Wedge, etc.) are primarily designed to interface instrumentation to a PC through either a serial port or a TCP/IP port. It is a tool that provides access to a device on a serial port or TCP/IP network address for another application program like a spreadsheet or database program.

Due to the nature of these products and the manner in which they are typically used, (i.e. data collection from instrumentation), date information is rarely either transmitted or received. When date information is received by the Software Wedge, it does not make any attempt to inspect or modify the data in any way for the purpose of insuring year 2000 compatibility. Again the user is responsible for making sure that date information received by the Wedge is in an acceptable format for their particular application. The Windows versions of the Software Wedge have a single feature that allows the transmission of a date string. This feature is implemented in the form of a DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) command. The command syntax requires the user to supply a date formatting string that represents the structure of the date string to be transmitted. The format string can contain either a two digit or four digit string representing the year portion of the date. The value for the year is retrieved from the operating system, which is fully year 2000 compliant, therefore if a four digit year format is specified, a year 2000 compliant string will be transmitted.

All Software Wedge products also have some capability to provide or append date and time information along with incoming (received) data from a device. This feature is referred to as "date and time stamping" of incoming data in the Wedge user manual. Again, the date and time information that is generated by the Software Wedge is obtained from the operating system (DOS or Windows). Since all versions of DOS and Windows are fully year 2000 compliant, there are no problems with date and time functions provided in the Software Wedge.

For More Information about the year 2000 issue with Microsoft operating systems please visit:http://www.microsoft.com/ithome/topics/year2k/

Year 2000 testing and compliance reports are available for WinWedge Standard and WinWedge Pro. These are $35 and can be ordered from TALtech's sales department.