this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Windows that was the main offender, but instead legacy systems of all kinds made since 1970, where people were not expecting for their programs to run for more than 30 years.
Surprise! Businesses don't care whether the code is old, as long as it works - so that data type you store the year in only held two characters, and hard-coded the 19 onto it.
1999 would be written as 99. 19 + 99 = 1999 = computers were happy.
2000 would be written as 00. 19 + 00 = 1900 = computers went to shit
Yeah good explanation. I was too young to had any further knowledge about this issue way back and only saw it manifesting when I had to adjust my windows 95 clock :)
Next doom and gloom scenario is 2038, when poorly maintained *nix systems will think it's Jan 1st, 1970.
I'll be pushing 68. Hopefully retired or dead by then.
... I'll probably still be working, though...
Eh, it only being an issue for 32-bit systems will hopefully help. But of course somebody will still be running that in 15 years.
And even then, 64-bit time for 32-bit systems is already a thing that's being implemented specifically to avoid this.
Lots of financial institutions are still using software programmed with Cobol. My father graduated with a software engineering degree for Cobol in the mid-1970s. My company provides external API for customers who still use green screen terminals. Of course there will be people running 32-bit systems. And I'm sure there will be well-paid jobs for fixing any date overflow on those systems.
It was definitely more than DOS and Windows, it was programs written on all kinds of platforms, from Unix to mainframes and more. That's also a key point, the operating systems were just part of the problem, it was the software found banking, industrial control, and all the things