Slashdot Mirror
1985 Usenet About Y2k
Anonymouse Cow writes "Here's a trip down memory lane (for some of you "oldsters"). Google's newsgroups has the first usenet mention of the Y2K bug... in 1985! Quote: "I have a friend that raised an interesting question that I immediately
tried to prove wrong. He is a programmer and has this notion that when we
reach the year 2000, computers will not accept the new date." Check out the replies!"
what a wonderful read. brings back great memories. What i found interesting was that every message was edited and that there were very few signatures .
ONEPOINT
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Lisa: Well, look at the wonders of the computer age now.
Homer: Wonders, Lisa, or blunders?
Lisa: I think that was implied by what I said.
Homer: Implied, Lisa, or implode?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'm worried about Y3K already!
-Valiss
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/12/172722 3&mode=nested&tid=95
Yeah, the developers already back then knew that they planted a ...krrrhmm... a few little easter eggs, but we don't want to be unemployed... do we?
Experienced bankingprogrammer in Cobol looking for a new job. //D Gary Grady
Remember, right after January 1? The world didn't explode (it didn't even implode!), so a handful of people in the media started saying the whole thing was a hoax to drive cash into the technology sector.
They have the nerve to say that even thoigh I have a fax machine that says it's 8/2/19102.
how old is this story? google's archive has been up for HOW LONG?!
enjoy the buggery of the weekend you stanks
They act as if the Y2K issue was completely made-up and unworthy of fixing because nothing broke when it rolled around. HELLO? Nothing broke because things got fixed beforehand. People are really dumb.
This was really an interesting read. I really appreciate Anonymous Cow going to the effort of finding this and posting the location for us all to peruse.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
What Slashdot articles will be linked to 15-20 years from now as being nostalgic.
:)
Surely not all the case mod ones...
Almost all of these were uttered in that Google thread from 1985 about Y2K :-)
Strangely, though, few seem to care that there are many file formats where the "automatic" kernel 64-bit date expansion they expect will be a problem. If the application expects that the date will always fit in that 32-bit field, and there's no obvious way to extend that field, then you have a lot of files which may no longer be useful...
"For those of you fixing things in your software:
:)
The year 2000 *is* a leap year, despite what many algorithms tell you.
The year 2400 is *not* a leap year.
With minimal effort, you can make things work until 2399. You may be
subject to complaints after that."
Funny how this gentleman had the insight to know that it really was a miniscule problem in 1985.
Of course (to be a bit cynical), I think the slime that profited from the Y2K hysteria knew this too
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
I don't know whether to to gaze into the beauty of the formated and edited messages or make prank calls to the phone numbers listed beneath them.
;-)
Ahh the conflicted mind
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I've always suspected that people in 1979 were smarter than today, and NOW I have proof!
Bug fix strategy for date roll-over...quoth message...
"First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development."
It's funny to see that this problem was known at least 30 years before the Y2K hysteria....I hope that this is a lesson to all of you young programmers....
"run away!...run away!..." Holy Grail...
wasn't this news about 4 or 5 years ago? Now that we are 2.5 years past Y2K, it makes this a moot point. Hell, why is this even on Slashdot now?
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Yeah. I think we've heard this one before...
Step 1. Write code. Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit!
Man, I love reading these old threads. It's always a cool bit of memory lane, seeing the old email addresses (UUCP, ARPA), and the old but still familiar sigs. And the coolest thing is the lack of flames. When the one person in the thread who was an astronomer made a mistake on leap years, no one jumped at his throat. One person even says "So, he made a mistake. Who doesn't?" That would never happen that nicely today.
Just some ramblings...
How naive. Little did they know that this would lead to total global chaos...Coke machines killing kids, toasters strangling people, and people using rusty bicycles as currency. You know...dogs and cats living together...the destruction of civilization as we know it.
Oh wait, that didn't happen...I gotta go find that money I buried.
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
First Year Was Year #0
C and C++ Forevaar!
(Doesn't really matter to you which year is the first)?
Well, there sure wasn't much to behold on jan, 1st. But some people apparently try to compensate for this. Making the y2k perennial sounds kind of perverted.n id=RZJJNU5ZLINN2CRBAELCFFA?type=humannews&StoryID= 1276187/
http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessio
September tenth was the time I thought things were going to go to hell. The Unix clock rolled over 1 billion. I drove an hour into the city to see if any electronics went haywire.
Little did I know it was the day after that an event took place.
Nothin new to Slashdot readers, I found out about the unix thing here anyway.
God spoke to me
I've been a cobol programmer for over 20 years, so this is an area I've got a lot of familiarity with. It actually did make sense in the 70's to save precious storage space and use 2 digits to store the year. It made sense later to make the necessary modifications to fix what software was still in use. The reason Y2K wasn't a disaster is because programmers like me spent some time upgrading old code. IT's part of what we do :)
FYI just announced today...Cool NERD clothing!!!
Err...no, 2400 IS a leap year!
To review:
2000: leap year
2100: not a leap year
2200: not a leap year
2300: not a leap year
2400: leap year
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
This link is from Google's list of historically significant usenet posts; the complete list is atc e_20.html
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announ
There's some really great ones in there, including Linus announcing Linux, Microsoft soliciting for new 'wizards', a thread about the chernobyl accident, and so on.
where can i get me a supersweet UUCP address like that? this ARPA MILnet interweb thing is getting old.
No one stores dates in 'ascii' format anymore. They are usualy stored as integer numbers representing a number of seconds after an offset.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I know that a lot of people blamed programmers for not fixing the problem long before it became a real problem. Many programmers countered that they had tried to fix it (some as far back as the late 1980s), but product managers and such refused to allow work on it, either not seeing the problem or an early example of deadlines over quality.
Finally, we programmers have proof that we considered the problem a good 15 years before it became problematic.
Now, what are we doing about the Y10K problem?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Taco, this is actually interesting, stuff that matters and nerdy!
These guys obviously had a grasp of the problem and understood how to avoid date problems in the future. They also understood the devastation that could ensue if dates were to go awry in software. But, as is human nature, did any of them do anything about the problems? I guess not, since 15 years later everyone was in a panic about Y2k. One guy even quit his job rather than fix a serious pending date problem in his system.
Human nature: ignore problems until you can't.
My nature: fix problems now, you'll be happier in the long run.
My fate: get treated as a doomsayer/whiner.
There is a cost to being proactive...
...is if Slashdot were looked back upon as one of the earliest mentions of the Y10k problem. None of those stupid programmers took into account 5 digits!!
Oh well, I'm looking forward to dealing with 2038 myself. What is it? About mid Janurary when it dies?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
2000-1979 != 30.
Hell, 2000-1979 isn't even CLOSE to 30.
Many of us read the Google timeline when it was first released. :)
Very interesting stuff. I remember that I was inspired to look through the history of Linux and GNU in the archives, and found the first announcement of Yggdrasil, the first Linux distribution. For all of you who complain about "GNU/Linux," you should know that Yggdrasil was billed as "Linux/GNU/X11."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
We all still waited to the LAST minute to fix the bugs :) I know that the accounting software company that I work for was up very late many nights in December 1999, upgrading UNIX servers and program files so that the "world" would not come to an end in the Oil Marketers pocketbooks.
J
Step 1. Write code. Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit!
But where is all the off-topic spam? Where are the trolls? Where is the porn? The flamers?
This is clearly some sort of clever mock-up of Usenet and not the real thing. Frankly, given the omissions I've stated above, it's not even a very well-done imitation; I'm shocked the /. boys would be fooled by it.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The xtime struct contains:
int_fast64_t sec;
int_fast32_t nsec;
In the 64-bit world, it's no problem--time_t is defined as a long long (64 bits).
Seriously, just LOOK at those posts. Proper grammar, proper punctuation. Hell, one guy even INDENTED the first line of a paragraph! Have you ever SEEN such madness?
"First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development."
Follow the 'highlights' link in this story.
Scroll down to 1985.
There was a problem with dates or something in the year 2000?
bolles@reed.UUCP -- uucp
Also notice, if you try to check out the cross linked posts..
Group: net . bugs (This group is no longer archived)
Group: net . flame (This group is no longer archived)
Group: net . puzzle (This group is no longer archived)
The first mention of the y2k bug was banks in 1975 calculating 25 year mortgages that ran into problems then with it.
But why the hell is this here?! This has been on Google's archive since I started using it, at least six months ago, and probably much longer.
"News for nerds, stuff that matters" the sign says. But this isn't news, and it sure as hell doesn't matter....
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
When the internet was populated by geeks only (and smart ones at that).
Looking back at it maybe we should have killed it while it was young.
War is necrophilia.
Check this one out (my emphasis added):
Some software blows up on dates at other times. I'm aware of some old
DEC software (don't worry... you're NOT using it... it's single user!)
that keeps the date year as a 5 bit offset from 1972. Let's see...
1972+31=2003, so it blows up in 2004. Probably, tho, the display-a-year
routine isn't written to handle beyond 31-dec-99, since no one expects
that RT11 (oops, now I said it) will still be used then. I hope.
---------
Join the (Hopefully) Great Usenet Blackout 4/11/1985
Alright, so maybe that wasn't in there. But wouldn't it just suck if someone 15 years from now posts a story about a 15 year old slashdot post to a huge newsite and all the people laugh at what huge dorks we were?
I'm betting Junis makes the cut. That thing always makes me laugh.
"So, the guy made a mistake. Why aren't astronomers permitted to make as many mistakes as programmers? I even make mistakes occasionally (though not that one)."
I like that quote. Programming has always been badly viewed by people with real jobs, it seems.
to prepare for the 5-digit Y10K problem.
With any luck, some disaster/messiah will plague us and we can reset the odometer.
-- L
on tape and on disk
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Sure they predicted the possibility of the Y2K bug, but they totally dropped the ball by overlooking the inherent necessity of the "2000 switch".....no Y2K--> no Office Space. It was pretty inevitable.
Skaweekz
One of the replies:
:)
"If you are really worried about timewrap breaking programs in subtle ways,
then set your clock ahead now, and find the bugs. That will give you several
years to fix them. If you are binary only, you might NEED several years
to get you vendor to fix them!"
See! Even in 1985, they understood that opensource bugs get fixed faster than properietary software!
Not exactly. The problem was that most machines use a date/time algorithm to maximize the system preformance. Given that, after the year 2000 all of the systems would start to equate certain logarithmic equations that would render the system unusable until the year 2400. It all has to do with something called voxels. Long story.
How prescient some people were back then :-)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...but why exactly is this in the Education topic? Surely something like Technology, Programming, or Bug would describe it better.
And the brethren went away edified.
Maybe Google should get some award for preservation of history? Imagine what kind of gems will turn up fifty or a hundred years from now.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
For example, compare
w ww.shadowkeeper.net/megan/html/lin.html
:)
http://www.shadowkeeper.net/megan/html/lin.html
to
http://web.archive.org/web/20010331050523/http://
ahh, memories
No need to bother going out to find your money.
All I can say is, January 2001 was a great month for a guy with a metal detector and an eye for upturned dirt.
It's interesting to note the fairly casual attitude everyone in the thread has toward this potential bug. Basically, they seem to be saying, "Yeah, it'll be an issue, I guess, but people will deal with it then, hey here's a funny story..."
Not that there's anything wrong with that attitude, but it does indicate two things: One, that even hardcore geeks (i.e. people who had email addresses in 1985) can be complacent about things that seem a long way off (rather than fixing it long before it'll become a problem, as would be "ideal", for suitable definitions of ideal); and two, that computers were not the societally pervasive force that they've become in the last decade. A lot of the reason people didn't see the Y2K bug having that much potential impact that far in advance was because this kind of omnipresence of computers was just beginning. (In AD 1985, personal computerization was beginning...) These days, even an average Joe on the street would probably be astonished to hear that any kind of, say, large utility wasn't thoroughly computerized, but in 1985, such a revelation would have been met with mostly blank stares.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I sat here reading the list of replies to the Y2K question and I began to be amazed at the usefulness, civility and maturity of the replies. What's happened to the public networks?
No NATIVE mac programs ever had problems with Y2K!
Another reason to use a macintosh!
Also I have always specified years in full. In programmed code and in written notation, always specifying all 4 digits of the year. I am good for another 8 thousand years. I have never met anyone else that has always typed all 4 digits of the year when writing, without once shortening it.
did anyone read Henry Spencer's post? Isn't he the guy behind FreeSWAN (among other things)? what was he doing in the zoology department...
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Gack...I feel old now. One of the posts in that thread was from me. Oh well, it's cool to know I participated in the first usenet Y2K discussion. :-)
This post is on Google's list of memorable posts. It's the first mention of Star Wars, Episode 6. I think the probability that this is THE Randal L. Schwartz is very high.
;)
How cool is that? He even scores for quintuple Nerdhood by:
1. Being on Usenet in 1982
2. Having his Usenet post on Google's memorable postings list
3. Being a Star Wars geek
4. Being a Star Wars geek ON Usenet, IN 1982!
5. Writing his own scripting language
And who knows, maybe that page at Google was generated by HIS scripting language
Wow, I haven't seen a .UUCP address in a LONG time! That brings back some memories....
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
My company's catalog/database systems still haven't been made year 2000 compliant. Supposedly it has something to do with the fact that we're a (USA) government contractor and everything must be approved by the customer before it can be done. That's also why our labs have no lights, our elevators haven't been inspected since 1979, and our "million dollar" computer system is slower than a $500 Athlon.
Knowing my employer, they'll use everything from the DMCA to the PATRIOT act against any prospective whistleblower which explains why I'm posting anonymously.
BTW, anyone out there hiring EE's with a graduate degree?
Slashdot: Are you planning to read Slashdot on August 17th 2002?
Users: Probably not - it's a Saturday.
Slashdot: Well if you do, whatever you do, don't read Slashdot on August 17th! The internal coding of "August 17th 2002" triggers a perl script that sends Cowboy Neal's entire Boy Band mp3 library to your e-mail account...
What did you do when the year turned to sh*t again? (Buy an 8080 based machine for improved performance and memory capability?)
Homer: "hmmm, they have the internet on computers now?!"
The post are interesting what people thought in the mid 1980s. Even though I started being a programmer in the late 90s (in college currently), I never thought that the y2k bug was for real.
In taking steps to check computers y2k compatibility, I took the oldest PC that my family had and changed the time. The pc was a 486DX50 running Win 3.11. I reset the clock and let it roll over. After it rolled over, I rebooted the machine. The computer froze on the first restart, after that it worked fine. My families other machine (a mac), I never worried about since it is compatible for a long time.
My pastor was even in somewhat of a worry. "Even stoplights could go out" he would say. I could see his theory but disagreed. Everyone I that talked about y2k, I told them about the 486, and that there would be nothing going wrong. As far as I know nothing major did go wrong.
I know that a few government computers failed, but they were old computers at that, and they were up after awhile. Airports didn't shut down like everyone expected, and life went on like normal.
Sometimes, you have to listen to the people that don't code, but have tried different test and have proven theories wrong. Maybe they are right. I just think it is funny all the worry that went into the "y2k bug" especially after nothing happened.
What about our descendants 3 billion years in the future? Can they blame POSIX for the Y292277264695 bug? (Yes I calculated it)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled moment of insanity...
"and tapes and disks cost SO MUCH to buy and store"
I wonder what the reaction to my 49.99 60 gig, ATA 100 drive would have been? I'm 21, but I can remember paying 129.99 for a 6.4 gig and that was the 'ish! Dad said something about 300$ for a 40 MEG drive way back when.
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
you know what was missing there? i didn't see anyone claim "first post"...
seriously though, i think it was interesting that the majority of their discussion seemed to be focused around the fact of calculating whether or not 2000 was a leap year, rather then the fact that computers couldn't handle the year 2000 because they were only storing the last two digits representing the year, and not the century...
also, noticed there was a lack of links to the "goatse.cx" website in the thread...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Just think that in a few years you will be able to refer to the year 2002 as aught-two! By the way the Websters Thesaurus also lists ought as an alternate spelling to aught.
Yikes. The year is more than half over and I don't find this out 'til now. So much lost time!
-a
How to rationalize theft.
I was one of the several thousand recently-then un-or-underemployed physicists who,in 1985, decided to create an international eventually graphical-interfaced, user-friendlied network which would somehow bring all the world the journals and the libraries, would occupy our talents, and most importantly, keep us employed in the soon-to-come downsizing era. It was common knowledge about the Big Bug, and especially amongst us 4-bit, bit-slice assembly folks building the LandSats and clones. Nobody cared, 'cause we all knew we'd have GigaHz processors running our own personal Unices in 64 bits (just like our Cyber-175s at work) anyway!
So nobody expected RT11 to be running after 1999?
I know someone in this building running RT11.
At least he was a few months ago; I haven't checked
recently.
Getting it to "play nice" on the net is
a PITA. It used to interfere with some of the
Solaris autoclients when I had some on the same
subnet as it.
"I think, though, that IBM will get moving on this problem around the
year 1995, if only so that the society on which they depend for profits
will continue to exist.
"
An IBM mainframe users' group, SHARE, I think, had a Y2K session at their meeting around 1978, and the presenters had already been working on the problem for quite some time by then.
So I was perusing the articles in Google, came across the Cold Fusion and some of the corresponding threads.
Someone makes a point, "From cold fusion it's not a far step for 750 terrorist cells to begin making H-Bombs in their kitchen"
Ironic that the H-Bombs are available first, eh?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Wow! I never knew CDC had this kind of history... I'd sure like to get my hands on that OS. And I wonder what M$ would think of it.
"These guys" were engineers.
Business decisions are not made by engineers; they are made by the people who employ engineers.
Business people with short term profit motives should not be confused with engineers having made or not made a decision to deal with the Y2K problem.
UNIX currently faces a Y2038 problem with 32 bit signed seconds since the epoch, yet I don't anyone paying people proactively deal with that problem; do you?
-- Terry
Anyway, Stockton's page had me occupied for a few good hours. It's quite a read. It has great stuff on it, like the base filedate for Windows "Last Modified" calculation, when 16-bit BSDs die, when NTFS fails, etc. LOTS of good dates there.
I even submitted my newly-discovered UNIAPI_TIME epoch value. It was much more exciting that submitting my transmeta-based Gateway/AOL Webpad's BogoMips value to the BogoMips mini-HOWTO.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Anonymity. Most people at that time used their real identities, and the community was smaller and simpler, so it would be harder to hide.
It's the same reason why bumping into someone while walking will lead to "excuse me" and "s'okay", but cutting someone off in traffic will lead to an angry honk and possibly tail-gating for the next several minutes.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I (maybe somewhat foolishly) just decided that there were 365.25 days in a year. That lead to 292271023045 years that it could represent. However, the Epoch was in 1970, so the last year it could represent would then be 292271025015 (looks like it would actually be April 24, 292271025015 at 07:37:38 or somewhere around there that it would roll over.
It would be too tedious to do an actual calculation of when it would roll over, I think, considering all the complex rules for leap years. Plus, you'd have to be able to calculate leap seconds, which would be a feat in itself. The ultimate death of Sol and probably the known universe as well may further complicate the calculations.
People seem to think that this was some unexpected oversight; it was nothing of the sort. Given the cost of storage at the time, and the millions of records that had to stored with one or more date fields, it was a purely economic decision to save money at the time. I don't have the numbers needed to do the math, but I suspect it was actually the right choice. If you compare the cost of additional required storage to the eventual rework cost, discounting for time, maybe it doesn't look so stupid. Especially since many programs really did cease to be used before the problem arose (although probably far fewer than we would have predicted)
We all joked at the time that, along about 1998 or 1999, we would take jobs in other industries until the changeover was complete.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
Surprisingly Google doesn't even mention the prescient Dance Dance Revolution discussion here:
U UCP
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=85%40nixbln.
Talk about a revolution.
If any of the original posters in this thread read slashdot, reply to this message? I'm simply curious.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From Critical dates:
# 3E11 approx. - UNIX 64-bit signed time_t fails (seconds from 1970) - A.D. 292,277,026,596-12-04 Sun 15:30:08 GMT (checked).
Even though I have no idea if it's right or not, the string "(checked)" makes me feel better. No one would lie on tha intarweb, right?
I thought this was great:
[snip]
"Good grief!" said I. "What happens in January of 1980?" She turned
pale and admitted she had considered that before but managed to put it
out of her mind. "So why not go ahead and fix it now?" I asked.
She pointed out that fixing it would require expanding the demand
deposit master record format, a mammoth undertaking. About a billion
COBOL programs would have to be recompiled. At this shop we were still
on cards and a rush compile took about a week. "You want to do that?"
she inquired. This time I turned pale. We considered our options,
knowing that one or the other of us would be called upon to fix the
problem. And you know what we did?
First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that
checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the
console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst
and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development.
[/snip]
I think it would be interesting to track down some of the participants from this thread (particularly Spencer L. Bolles, the originator) and get their viewpoints 17 years later.
Start posting to usenet now and get on /. in 10002.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
"From: larry@extel.UUCP (larry@extel.UUCP)
Subject: Re: Computer bugs in the year 2000
Newsgroups: net.bugs
View this article only
Date: 1985-01-24 10:05:00 PST
Another problem is that we have gotten into the habit of only using the
last 2 digits of the year (look at your checkbook). Even worse is that
some business software only allows a 2 character wide field for the
date. Perhaps the designers did not expect their program to be in use
in the year 2000 but I would not be suprised to see a considerable
amount of 370 code running in the year 2000.
Just think that in a few years you will be able to refer to the
year 2002 as aught-two! By the way the Websters Thesaurus also lists
ought as an alternate spelling to aught."
Say what? aught-two ?? Anyone here calls it aught-two ??
[alk]
R.W.Bemer, "What's the Date?", Editorial, Honeywell Computer J. 5, No. 4, 205-208, 1971
Here is a funny quote from him: He has a rather impressive list of accomplishment to go along with those tidbits, including prior art for the British Telecom patent fiasco.
A pretty neat dude.
That is the highest signal to noise ratio I've ever seen on USENET - and it was crossposted to net.flame!
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
char timebuff[4];
*((int*)timebuff) = time(NULL);
Instead we do stuff like this:
time_t timebuff;
timebuff = time(NULL);
When the system type for time_t is change to something with more than 32 bits, the code just needs a recompile and voilla - it handles dates past 2038. The work is going to be in making sure every program gets recompiled, and in converting saved files that have the date already stored in 32 bits. The ugly part will be if your system depends on third-party stuff in binary form only that you can't upgrade for whatever reason.
Note, I didn't say the problem will be nonexistant, just that it will be easier to fix than y2k.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How about those UUCP addresses? I'm glad we no longer use email addresses that include the routing information with them (which UUCP addresses did) a simple username@host.domain.tld for me thank you very much!
In one of the messages, a "Tim Smith" says:
:-)
If you are really worried about timewrap breaking programs in subtle ways,
then set your clock ahead now, and find the bugs. That will give you several
years to fix them. If you are binary only, you might NEED several years
to get you vendor to fix them!
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I think it's sad that now whenever Y2K comes up, it's commented on as "The Y2K hoax".
I salute the heros of Y2K who worked to make sure that critical systems kept working. Yes, some were paid upwards of $100/hr, and thank goodness!
We should remember that Y2K went off without a hitch because of the work that was done, not because it was unnecessary.
=Shreak
Ok, i wasnt even born when those posts were made, can someone explain to me why the addresses end in things like .UUCP instead of .com, .co.uk etc?
And whats with things like "ihnp4!wlbr!callan!tim or ihnp4!cithep!tim" at the end of posts?
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
Maybe they just thought by the year 2000 we'd have evolved to a new stage of consciousness, and would live eternal lives as cosmic spirits of energy.
It was the 70s, remember.
I think, though, that IBM will get moving on this problem around the year 1995, if only so that the society on which they depend for profits will continue to exist.
Interesting how things change. THey had no clue there would be another dozen movers and shakers in the industry by 1995, and Mircosoft was hardly a blip on the radar. IBM was the 800lb guerilla.
where will we be in 2017? I wonder if IBM looked as invincible to those guys in '85 as MS does to us in '02.
Also, did anyone see a post with a signature that said "linus" on it? I think I did, and was wondering what that referred to in 1985. Here it is below:Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
One of the replies was ended with the signature Robert Stroud, Computing Laboratory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. My father was working at the University of Newcastle, as a programmer, during the 80s. :) I shall have to ask my parents if they know the name.
With all the recent hoopla about SQL rivalries, I still have a warm place in my heart for Fox Software - especially pre-M$ incarnations.
Working (when the ball came down) for a service company, there were quite a few machines that came across the bench, in which we'd install a BIOS override card from DFI. No biggie.
Y2K was a hoot for the owners of the company. We sold many copies of QuickBooks, etc. :)
db
Cig:
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fuck penis fart ass sick wank shit pussy scab discharge
You know, once again I find it hilarious that Cmdr Taco gave "Troll" a -1 mod, but then rewards trolls in every other way.
The guy crossposted to net.bugs, net.flames, and net.puzzle. And he said, "I'm not a programmer, but there's this programmer dude that I talked to, and he said that all the computers are gonna explode in 2000. Is this really true? I haven't thought about it at all, but I just thought I'd ask you all just to see what you think?"
It reads like one of the lamest "ask slashdot" posts ever. But, in truth, this was quite clearly a troll. A clever and interesting troll, but most certainly a troll. And Taco has gone and brought even more attention to it, giving it a +5 mod for all eternity. Why? Because despite all claims to the contrary, CmdrTaco likes trolls.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
No joke.
A 1985 prophet.
The Telecom Digest from November 1983.
It claims that in China..
The number of telephones for every 100 residents in the major cities will rise from only four to 20 by the year 2000.
Ha!
mogorific carpentry experiments
I vaguely remember that the issue reared its ugly head in some IBM department in the early 1960's. IIRC, there was going to be a change for the new system 360 comming out to address Y2K-like problems, but it was decided that it would hold up the 360 release date.
Does anybody have any further info on this? It is only a rough memory of something I read a year or two ago.
And another memory of reading something about a complaint from a respected researcher in the late 1950's, but the excuse was that punched cards had only 80 columns and there was often not enough room for more digits.
I am sorry I can't remember more details, but 1985 is not likely to first raise of it.
Table-ized A.I.
One of my CS professors at LSU back in '82 told us about the bug. IIRC, he said that probably no one would bother doing anything about it until 1999. Looks like he was pretty much on the mark.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
In the original, our hero worked for some big outfit.
He was hearing of some big rumble on the executive floor.
He gets called in, there are slumping figures, and the big brains on the executive floor are stumped! They have tried everything! They have had all their staff scouring the files looking for missing account files, or mis-filed orders.
Finally, in the interests of completeness, someone decides to call in an IT guy to look at the program that produces the summary of expected income.
Well, he looks at it. It reaches its summary of projected income by adding up all the expected payments scheduled over the next 1000 working days, and dividing by 1000. In early 1996 1000 working days reached into the year 2000.
His solution? He changed the program so it summed the expected income over the next 500 working days, and divided by 500, on the theory that in 500 working days it would be someone else's problem.
A lecturer in a Fortran IV class (ptui!), part of the Mathematics syllabus (grr punched cards, grr core dumps), said something to the effect of : "some people say that storing the year as two digits will cause problems in the year 2000" -- followed by general laughter. After all software only lasts a year or two , right? So No Worries.
Now I'll need to do some C++ or Java to get the Fortran and the IBM360 core hex dumps outta my head.
Bitter and proud of it.
Here's where I get modded down for geezerness, but heavens to Betsy, Usenet was great back then. Back before the Internet exploded and innocence was lost.
Here we see a Usenet thread, with thoughtful and interesting responses from knowledgeable, experienced people at universities and research institutes. No flame wars, no snot-nosed kids from AOL, no spamming, no hot grits or Natalie Portman, no ranting about how Usenet is a mysterious cabal of Illuminati scheming to rob our freedoms and kill our firstborn.
I wasn't around in the nerdy, cliquish days of 1985 (I'm not that old!), but I did see the early 90's -- when Usenet was still a respectable hangout for serious and informative disussion -- dissolve into the mid 90's -- when all hell broke loose. It was exciting, and only logical, to see such a useful medium become so popular, but now the spammers and ranters and schemers have completely taken over. There are still a few pearls in there these days, but you have to go look for them in that enormous, stinking pile of shit.
I used to use the 'vi' binding in 'nn', which gave me a full curses screen to type my posts. Now I type Slashdot comments in this puny little HTML textarea. What has the world come to?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I guess everything I say on usenet going back 50 years will remain forever archived on google? Sheezh the privacy implications of it all.
Apparently this popular young singer named Britney Spears was interviewed online on AOL. One of her young fans asked her what plans she had for New Years Eve. Ms Spears replied she had to stay home, because her mom was worried about how Planes would crash from the sky, and how elevators would stop working...
Not that related but here is a funny April fools y2k spoof that I am afraid I fell for hook line and sinker when it was reprinted in Risks on April 15th.
However, the thing a lot of people fail to realize is that if it hadn't been hyped up terribly in those last few remaining years, we actually _would_ have been in deep shit.
You'll note that most Y2K compliant software and hardware was kludged to accept the roll-over, and nothing more (notice how just about everything still uses the 2 digit year?). Not only that, but most of it was done "just in time".
Granted, it probably didn't have the potential to be as bad as some people anticipated, but it definitely would have been a serious problem without the hype driving companies to implement their hacks.
This may be the only time in history where the dotcom business model worked like a charm:
Step 1: Ponder the implications of hypothetical Y2K bug, still fifteen years away
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: Profit!!!!
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
This quote,
:-) ... is interesting. IIRC some countries made it legal to reverse engineer software to fix Y2K "bugs" in the late 1990s.
If you are really worried about timewrap breaking programs in subtle ways,
then set your clock ahead now, and find the bugs. That will give you several
years to fix them. If you are binary only, you might NEED several years
to get you vendor to fix them!
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
In 1999 we informed all our customers that our software had the year 10,000 bug. They should call us no later than 9995, and there would be an extra charge if we had to come from another galaxy.
As a reasonably young guy (26, undergraduate), I only heard/saw date problems for pre-1900 people before Y2K problem took hype. But, as the whole Usenet thread shows, there were a lot of people aware of that kind of problems, even before 1985.
So, why take to mid nineties to become a real question? I guess all new software development should be Y2K aware by 1990!
Got Pike?
so here i am reading all the replies to the post. and i'm looking around for the moderation on it. was this an insightful reply? was the other one supposed to be funny? should i have been laughing at it?
how did they get by in those days?
Damn. I did a whois and it's already taken. I wanted to get this domain and sell it like that dude did with year2000.com. Anyone know when the next big date fuck up is gonna be? Mind sharing it?
I recall how one of my friend's parent's old video cameras with a date function rolled over to January 1st, 1984 for some reason. It still worked and everything, it just only allowed you to chose the year between 1984-1999 in the clock. I had some non-Y2K FTP software (WinFTP_LE, I think), and it listed dates over 1999 as 19100, which messed up the formatting in the window, but still worked everwhere else (I got more modern software soon afterwards). I wish my XT wasn't destroyed by a 5-year old with a screwdriver in 1995. I would have loved to see how that handled the Y2K. Of course, us old XT users always knew that January 1st of 1981 was a Thursday.
Reading these posts are funny and make me miss the old days a little (just a little, no LINUX or OpenBSD in 1985, and a TRS-80 cost several grand). There were some pretty crappy proprietary dating systems back then. Hard to believe that someone forgot to program a year field at one bank, and then just made an extra byte for it, putting off the problem for another 7 years. Towards the end, when the posts broke down arguing about Gregorian math and the year 2400, I liked how someone piped up, "Folks, there is a REAL WORLD out there, this is a serious problem!"
When working with computers in the early 1980s (I was a teen), I recall how on one field trip, we visited our county recordkeeping system, and those rows and rows of hanging shelving with magnetic tape reels in them. I wonder if they ever backed those up in a more convenient and durable format? They probably had to before 2000.
From: Tim Smith (tim@callan.UUCP)
:-) /.
Subject: Re: Computer bugs in the year 2000
Newsgroups: net.bugs, net.flame, net.puzzle
View this article only
Date: 1985-01-25 13:26:42 PST
If you are really worried about timewrap breaking programs in subtle ways,
then set your clock ahead now, and find the bugs. That will give you several
years to fix them. If you are binary only, you might NEED several years
to get you vendor to fix them!
______________
I think I found the first dig at closed source software. I hope he found a home on
Oh, and just because PDP11's don't get mentioned enough around here.
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of PDP11s.
That was the first discussion on Usenet.
It had clearly been discussed before. But not on Usenet. (For instance in 1975 Usenet didn't exist to discuss it on.)
Or is the surprise that it was recognized as early as 1985? That's not even interesting, as this case only mentions the computer clock Y2K issue. I ran into a more serious Y2k issue in the early 1980's - was working on a financial mortgage program and, with the database languages of the time also supporting only a 2 digit year in the date, quickly hit problems I had to resolve when the ending date of a mortgage looked to the data base software as it it came before the starting date of the mortgage. Not all 2 digit date problems waited until the year 2000 to surface.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The really crazy thing is the lack of troll postings / genital altering advertisements. Seems that almost every comment was insightful and relevant. just like this one isn't...
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Couple of posts down:
First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that
checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the
console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst
and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development.
--
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-3695
Fuckin dookies.
(Sorry if something similar to this has already been posted)
After Y2k shouldn't we see that the problem isn't in the size of the date storage, but in a rollover problem inherent to this scheme?
Why not do this instead - store the date as a series of ASCII characters, as a text string. Every time the date's going to get bigger by one digit, you simply add a character. You'll never have a problem, not after the billion years of 64 bit dates - never. Plus, you can make the time as accurate as you want as well with no penalty. And I think hard drives are getting bigger fast enough that one digit for every 10**x years won't matter...
...what was goiong on in the tech world when I was merely 4 years old.
To the comments on programmers being "st00pid": I guarentee there where 800x the compitent engineers, coders and all around computer personel than there are today. If you had to store a database of transaction records and you have 640k of RAM (yes, total, OS, program, and allocated blocks) or LESS, and a tape drive to write to disk with, and a punchcard reader for reloading code, wouldn't you shortcut? Not to mention that recompiling a whole system of the type would take (IIRRC) a WEEK?
ANcient times, I know, as we sit warm from the glow of out (now becomming obsolete even) CRT monitors with our 2GHz prosessors, our 1GB of RAM, and 180GB IDE drive, and 4xAGP GeForce 4 Ti .
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
In that thread, you will also find the first mention of the Y2038 problem affecting society.
You will also find a mention of Y2038 back in 1982 but only as a source code issue.
Here it is:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=2038+net.bugs
And this big is the best:
"I think the real trouble will come on January 3, 2000, not January 1,
since the 3rd is the first business day."
Goodness knows no one would EVER think to use those clunky hunks of scrap metal outside the office.
You can add and store 64 bit values without needing to have a 64 bit processor.
The problem is the same as it has always been: not enough reserved space for storing the expansion bits, or the storage order being byte swapped or not zeroed, so not upgradeable, or some short sighted person grabbed the expasion space for some other use, other than what was originall intended.
It's the same storage problem that we faced over Y2K; the only difference is that there isn't an externalization problem like there was with Y2K.
Kind of insane, considering that by the time UNIX came around, we weren't paying $1 per byte of storage (the real reason for Y2K -- nothing to do with short sighted engineers, since they would rather the company had bought them the extra core memory, instead of cheaping out).
-- Terry
So any one know if the 2.1K pronlem is fixed .. BTW Win98SE won't let you set the clock to the year 2100 but my Pocket PC has it right .. no leap year ...
Why are there no Year on slashdot posts or articles? You have no idea what year an article was written.
old school stuff
80 years from now :oops we made are code so it will quit working In 3000. People go crazy again for no good reason
This was written to use up your time hahahssa alaahsdhaj asdjfkjafjkfsd gsdd.dsgfsg gf.fs dsf dfdfds gffgfd
Has anyone noticed that Windows XP doesn't allow you to set the year past 2099?
I know that it's a lot further off, and unlikely to "make" people upgrade, but would you think twice about buying software that "May not function correctly after year x"?
Programmers & Companies have always designed limitations in software in the hope that they'll need to be replaced with updated versions.
Wow, that's right up there with "Bush knew about 9-11 two months before it happened"...
nt
You are reading the wrong threads.
.
Think about the fact that media hype, in the end, is what brought the Y2K problem to the forefront; what made the Managerial types finally listen, and slow down, and allocate some hours to a bug fix. Many thousands of hours, in fact.
Now think about how many other problems exist. While you're thinking about that, try to also think about how many usenet threads exist. Now, try to imagine what percent of those threads discuss problems foreseen, and solutions to those problems.
Now don't you wish you could cross-index every usenet post ever against every problem, every disaster, that's occured in that time frame?
Or, in other words, what if the net could think like our wet-net's?
With all due respect, the argument of "bits were too precious back then" is complete bullshit. Think about this:
Starting from say, 1950, if you only store the last two digits of a year and add 50 to each record, you'll need numbers between 0 and 49 to capture every date before you need more intelligent code anyway (like 1950 + X instead of 19 . 50 + X). You can encode all of these numbers using 6 bits.
How many dates can you store using a mere 8 bits? You have numbers 0 through 255, so you get years 1950 to 1950 + 255, or 2205. 16 bits buys you multiple millenia.
Be honest. You were not rejoicing over saving a whole 2 bits. Now think. How were these dates actually stored? I have yet to see a single database that stored these in 6 bit binary format. I haven't even seem them store it in 8 bit binary, offset from 50 (or 1950). Every single old database I've seen used the two digits in their database field. To encode "1971", they would store "71". As in, 0x37 0x31 in ASCII. So they were using 16 bits anyway!
Don't kid yourselves. It was *not* a smart design decision. It was *not* to save those precious two bits that no one ever saved anyway. It was bad design and bad programming.