CHEKDATE

Battery-powered clock/calendars in our PC's and XT's are very convenient. But
the batteries powering these clocks have a limited lifespan, and many of them
are beginning to weaken and fail now. We probably won't even discover that
the battery has failed until one day we need to determine the date of a file,
and discover that everything is dated 1/1/80. Failing batteries can also
cause the calendar to be set too far forward, to the middle of the week after
next, or perhaps to the year 2001.

CHEKDATE offers a simple way to watch over the clock/calendar. It maintains a
file, LASTDATE.DAT, recording in it the date when it was last run. Each time
CHEKDATE runs, it checks the current date against the date on file. If the
current date is earlier than, or more than 15 days later than, the last
recorded date, CHEKDATE issues an error message and asks for the correct date
until it receives one that is acceptable. Once an acceptable date is
received, LASTDATE.DAT is updated and CHEKDATE terminates. (If the
LASTDATE.DAT file is missing, CHEKDATE verifies that the current date is after
early May 1987.)

CHEKDATE is written in HS/FORTH, an implementation of the Forth programming
language. Portions of the executable code are copyright (c) 1987, Harvard
Softworks, Inc.