Ibm, Microsoft Sued Over Y2K Problem

Thu., Dec. 24, 1998

From Staff

International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been named in federal lawsuits charging them with selling products that are not Year 2000 compliant.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs said Wednesday the two lawsuits allege the companies knew or should have known certain of their products would mistake the last two digits in the year 2000 for the year 1900.

IBM and Microsoft representatives weren’t immediately available for comment, Dow Jones News Service reported.

A lawsuit was filed against IBM on behalf of all purchasers of a “bundled solution” that comprises IBM’s RISC 6000 computer system with AIX o/s version 4.1 and Medic Computer Systems Inc.’s application software version 7.0.

A separate lawsuit filed against Microsoft alleges the company made and distributed its FoxPro and Visual FoxPro products with latent date sensitive code defects, and failed to provide owners with effective notice of the defect.

The two suits seek damages, as well as notice and correction of the defect without charge.

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Ibm, Microsoft Sued Over Y2K Problem

Jesse Tinsley

Jim Meehan

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