It seems our dear friend, the Apple Newton MessagePad 2x00, has been bitten by another time related bug. While this looks like the Y2010 bug, this seems to be a new problem. I noticed that my MP2100 ran out of batteries the other day, but didn’t pay too much attention, however a lot of people are now reporting strange behavior of their devices, with freezes and dates being set randomly. And I just checked, also my MessagePad went back to 1990! It seems this happened after January 4th this year.

From what Matthias Melcher reported, it unfortunately looks like the bug is happening quite a few layers down from the Y2010 bug. That bug is an issue in the NewtonScript layer, but this new one (we need a clever name for it still) is related to timers in the OS layer. That will likely make it quite a bit harder to fix, but we’ll see. The good news is that we have Einstein now which makes any kind of experiments much easier and with less danger to actual hardware!

So let’s get to it, fire up Einstein and play a bit with dates and times…