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

Old news

[awptic]

This link is from Google's list of historically significant usenet posts; the complete list is at
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announc e_20.html

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.

Re:Back to the future

[saphena]

Speaking as a member of the 'slime' that profited (I produced DOSCHK.EXE used to test PC BIOS rollovers) ... I beg to differ with the description of "miniscule problem".

While it's a fairly trivial task to make the actual corrections to the programs, it most certainly was not a trivial task to:-

1) Make sure that EVERY y2k bug was identified
2) Recompile/retest/re-rollout many thousands of affected programs.
3) Persuade all suppliers/customers/trading partners to fix the systems.

In the end, the world didn't end *because* we had pulled out the stops and fixed the bugs. It's worth noting though that examples of every type of predicted failure did actually occur.

The originating article here dates from 1985 - the problem had been identified with 15 years to go. Why were non-compliant PCs still being built in 1997? Why were software houses *still* producing non-compliant code in 1995?

Re:This is Usenet?!?

[necrognome]

Things started to go downhill here, but maybe this was an even better sign of things to come.