Sage faces year 2000 blip with Dos for PCs

Sage Software has appealed to Microsoft to protect its user base as it revamps its application suite to cope with the year 2000 problem.

The problem lies in Dos rather than Windows. David Pinches, marketing director at Sage, said 40 per cent of its installed base used Dos versions.

It relied on operating system vendors to protect them from rollover problems on 31 December 1999.

He said: 'There is no doubt a number of our products will need to be updated for 2000. We started a year ago and will release updates over the next couple of years. The next update is Sterling for Windows.

It is in beta and will be out by the end of the year.'

Pinches said many of Sage's customers will continue to use Dos because they had established systems and used machines that will be too expensive to update.

Sage wants to ensure its customers can upgrade, but Pinches was unable to say whether Microsoft would issue upgrades of pre-Fat 16 Dos to protect Sage's client base.

The complex flavours of Microsoft's OS mean that many applications will not work well into the next century, it has emerged. A white paper from the company has shown that both application software and operating systems suffer from the limitations of Dos.