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!"

Comments

And now Y2038

[shoppa]

Many of today's programmers are curiously nonchalant about Y2038, when Unix and other OS's that store the date in number of seconds since 1970 in a 32-bit signed quantity overflow and the date goes negative. The vast majority lump it into the somebody else's problem category, for one of several reasons:

• They won't be around.
• Surely the date field will expand to 64 bits by then.
• They plan on making a lot of money 36 years from now

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...

reading old usenet posts

[Jafa]

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...

my favorite reply

[elmegil]

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.

How prescient some people were back then :-)

You know what I think makes the difference?

[Dephex Twin]

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.

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