The time and date supplied by DOS to P11 is accurate to about 1/18th of a second and is provided to the P11 application developer in an alphanumeric form based on the value sent it by DOS. It is not expected that Microsoft will change the old DOS function to return a differently formatted value as that would surely cause numerous problems to many, many programs, as well as violate the #1 rule in Operating System requirements: Stability. More likely, is that Microsoft will provide a new function or subfunction which will have a "four digit date" in it. In fact, they may already do this in current DOS versions, but as of the last update to the P11 program (in 1994, as stated above) there was no such function, so it is not available because the author (that's me again) no longer upgrades the development tool. Instead, I spend my time developing interactive animation programs with the tool (which is a lot more fun than Assembler Language Programming!)

One might fairly ask: Why do I keep using this old tool when things like JAVA and HTML are making universal access the buzzwords of the day? First of all, P11 runs on about 95%-99% of the PC's out there, and that percentage has been growing, not shrinking, since Windows 3.1 came out and especially, since Windows 95 came out. P11 programs run very reliably, which means we can distribute software for free or very inexpensively to millions of people without incurring extensive support problems. This benefits our customers even more than it benefits us, of course. It is certainly part of the reason why people continue making THE HEART: THE ENGINE OF LIFE "pick of the week" and whatnot on BBS's and things. It is surely why university professors and industry trainers around the world routinely tell us they are showing pump animations from ALL ABOUT PUMPS in their state-of-the-art classrooms.