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!"
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
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?
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.
actually you should be worried about 2038 before you start worrying about 3000
"Save me jebus!" - Homer Simpson (btw, I'm probably talkin out of me arse)
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...
am i the only one who wasted my 31st Dec 1999 hanging around a nearby ATM, just in case ?
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...
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.
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.
I kept looking for the "Reply" button so I could tell them how it turned out.
I guess it wouldn't work in that direction, though.
I did too, but it wasn't a waste. I robbed all the suckers that were withdrawing all their money!!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
It's called nostalgia...
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.
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).
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?
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?
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.
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.
The one about the crazy geek that ported Linux to run on that piece of home electronics that was never intended to run Linux. That's a keeper.
And that other one about that crazy geek that modified his computer case for no reason other than it looked cool. I'll be telling that story to my grandkids.
-B
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.
on tape and on disk
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
RTFA.
The discussion happened well before 1979, close enough to be considered almost 30 years ago. I'm sure he wasn't the first person to think about the problem.
...
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!
How prescient some people were back then :-)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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
I kept looking for the "Reply" button so I could tell them how it turned out.
I guess it wouldn't work in that direction, though.
Of course not. Their news reader app cannot handle the four digit year....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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
Beyond that, the article was posted in 1985! Sheesh.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I'm worried about Y3K already!
I think it's Y10K that's going to be the REAL ball-buster. How many systems out there are using 5 digits to store the year???
I'm laying in my emergency supplies right now!
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. :-)
Actually, Sept. 10 is the day it all went to hell. I woke up in the morning and forgot to wish my wife "Happy Birthday" until about 20 or 30 minutes later. She didn't buy my story when I tried to blame it on the UNIX clock rollover.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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
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...
Homer: "hmmm, they have the internet on computers now?!"
Yes, Henry Spencer was a major contributer to the FreeSWAN project, although he is no longer employed by them. He also wrote a popular regexp package (if you're running regex, try typing "man 7 regex").
-a
How to rationalize theft.
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.
Henry Spencer is one of the great fixtures of Usenet. He worked at the University of Toronto I think, and was a sys admin/programmer/demigod sort of person. He's had his hands in all sorts of great and wonderful things that we take for granted nowadays.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"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.
"
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.
"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
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.
Heh probably.
On y2k, I was at a friend of mine's house. When midnight rolled around, the power went out.
Turns out, her brother ran to the fuse box and threw all the switches. So yes, y2k did cause a power outage.
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.
"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
For some reason, the UoT's Zoo dept also churned out C News, the replacement for B News, later replaced by INN. There was a really good paper on the design and implementation (software design goals, profiling, performance issues and so on) of C News that taught me a lot about writing healthy code, but I have managed to forget most of it... *Google, Google* Ah, the name did ring a bell - that was Henry Spencer too, together with Geoff Collyer.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
the following is an excerpt from a post in the news thread:
(msd = mean solar day)
1 year = 365.2422 msd = 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 + error
That's why we have:
leapyear 1 out of 4
non leap year 1 out of 100
leapyear 1 out of 400 (So 2400 is a leap year.)
Read any basic astronomy book.
i'd rather head to the bar than do the math right now, so i'll pretend you did your math on a '93 pentium.
-f
www.blackant.net
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.
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.
So, in order for the y2k coders to not be grafters bamboozling people out of their money, their projects would have had to fail so you'd notice a problem?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
re: Linux/GNU/X11: And had they continued the trend to today, it would take a pargraph to finish writing the name of the OS. Names must be short, and they *must* necessarily leave out some details to be useful. Otherwise you might as well not bother giving something a name and just use the longhand description each time. So the question is, given that GNU is only responsible for writing *some* of the code for the OS, why should it get top billing up in the name? It's not practical to give everyone who deserves it top billing up in the name, because as mentioned above, names *must* necessarily leave details out or there's no point to having them.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I remember pouring over a Feb '90 copy of MacUser (I think it was talking about new SyQuest removeable storage cartridges.) Waaaay in the back, APC was advertising a 1 GB drive for only $1995.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
>it most certainly was not a trivial task to:-
> [...] Make sure that EVERY y2k bug was identified
Yup. I spent 1998 writing C++ code to plow through COBOL programs looking for dates. A favorite COBOL trick was to reuse the same field for months, years and non-dates (memory was scarce). We called those "modal dates."
> Why were software houses *still* producing non-compliant code in 1995?
It didn't help that there were "Introduction to COBOL" books for sale in 1998 that used 2-digit dates in examples.
As to why things didn't collapse, there certainly was a lot of work involved. A big question was whether errors would propagate - like falling dominoes - or be caught and ignored.
We processed code from a large bank. One program was supposed to produce quarterly reports. Due to a logic error, the reports for the first 3 quarters were all zeroes, and the fourth report actually contained entire year totals. A major bug, but it affected nothing. Whoever was supposed to read the report probably just shrugged and moved on.
That's how it was, mostly. Things went wrong. People looked, shrugged and moved on. Sometime after 1/1/00 I brought up the web site for a "partner" of our parent company. There, on the home page, was today's date: September 2, 101. Shrug and move on.
To exchange information to other hosts, before protocols like DNS became mainstream there was a public Systems repository. The addresses indicated showed the path that a mail or post would take before it would be delivered. A single post make take 5 modem calls between hosts at varying times of the day (depending on long distance costs) before it would show up. It definitely wasn't as fast as it is now over a live TCP/IP network.
I still believe that some newspaper wire companies and stuff still use UUCP to dial up and move news articles. UUCP was cool for its time. As much as people clamored for lots of bandwidth and a nice static IP, it was cool enough just to BE a UUCP node. UUCP was much like later protocols like FidoNet - but UUCP used Arpa compatible mail headers so it could be used for sites that had live Arpa network connectivity.
Anyways, hope that helps. You old-timers that know more then me feel free to correct me. I'll go back to listening to the Dodgers Game.
-Pat
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.
Actually current coding practice has an implicit Y10K bug not Y3K.
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
Probably a "Peanuts" Fan. I expect the first host to be named was "Snoopy"
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
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
that's just his bang path. Evidently "linus" was a large-ish machine in 1984 (probably a system named after the owner/IT guy who had the name of linus)
When this all started really bubbling up I recalled reading several articles about the bug in Infoworld in the mid-late eighties, and thinking "they aren't going to wait until 1999 to start fixing this are they?" D'oh!
I'm pretty sure I read something in an OMNI magazine "Antimatter" or "Continuum" column from back in the early eighties that described Y2K (probably between an expose on psychic UFO's and some art by Giger).
I'm surprised no one has published a detailed history of early references to Y2K along with a definitive account of the responses and eventual results. It would have been an exploitive no-brainer a few years ago, and a thoughtful and objective account would be even more interesting in retrospect now that the doom-saying is well behind us and the "I told you so's" have died down as well.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
y2k38.com is still available! Grab it now!
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
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.
You are partially right.. However, it's very unlikely that something would have happened on the scale that people were talking about.
Just because no one could accurately predict what would happen doesn't mean that the world would explode. I seriously doubt that anyone would program some logic along the lines of "if year = 1900 then take off every zig" into a computer controlling the launching of nukes and/or missiles.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
If the system uses a signed long integer for date and 1/1/1970 as the base, then it dies in 2038 (1970 + 68 years). If it's unsigned then it gets till 2106 (1970 + 136 years). If we switch to 64-bit systems and integers then it would last nearly to the 5,850,000th century.
Dyolf Knip
365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/500 = 365.2420
Given a day of 365.2422 days, the error for our current system is 25.92 seconds extra per year. But the error for un-skipping every 500th-year leap year is 17.28 seconds per year too little, almost a third less!
And if we un-skipped every 456th-year leap year, then the error is only 0.6 seconds per year! We need to do this right away! I demand accuracy!
Of course...
365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/456 + 1/142500 gets it right on the button. So if we use the new system starting on 2000, then 2400 will skip a leap year (just like 2100, 2200, and 2300), but February 2456 will be 30 days long! As will 2912, 3368, 3824, etc. Feb 7700 will gain two days (1/4 and 1/456) and lose one (1/100), so will only be 29 says. Feb 144500AD, not lining up with 456, would have only 29 days, but 28700 would, so would have 30 days again! Fortunately, no year will have a February with 31 days in it. That would just be wrong.
Everyone start marking your calendars!
Dyolf Knip
Going with a 365.2422-day long year, I get a one-day error after 3333 years. When did the Gregorian first start being used? Add 3333 to that year and that's when we'll need the adjustment.
Dyolf Knip
...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?
If you aren't running your Unix on a 64-bit architecture (or better) by 2038, then you deserve whatever comes your way. Either ia64 or AMD's 64-bit architecture (possibly both) should be widely in use within 3 to 5 years, and nearly all of the 32-bit machines retired well before 2038. Although, with a 64-bit Unix you have to worry about the year 292,271,025,015, but that is most definitely past my retirement, and therefore not my problem.
Best Slashdot comment ever
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
Yes, and we all know god intended us to measure in feet and inches instead of meters.
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.
You are reading the wrong threads.
.
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.