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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!"
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
And how many bits is that integer number? And what is the base used? 32 bit Unix rolls in 2038.
Rollover will always be a problem somewhere along the line. Hopefully, a 64 bit date field will be good enough until computers themselves are obsolete (over 584 million years at a resolution of 1 ms).
Further, there are ASCII dates hanging around, look at all the perl webpages or the programming language MUMPS which is probably holding your medical record information somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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
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