Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
Yes, most administrative programs, think hospitals, municipal, etc had a year set only in 2 digits. Yesterdays timestamp will read as 99 years in the future, since the year is 00. Imagine every todo item of the last 20 odd years suddenly being pushed onto your todo list. Timers set to take place every x time can’t check when last something happend. Time critical nuclear safety mechanisms, computers getting stuck due to data overload, everything needed to be looked at to determine risk.
So you take all the dates, add size to store additional data, add 1900 to the years and you are set. In principle a very straight forward fix, but it takes time to properly implement. Because everyone was made aware of the potential issue IT professionals could more easily lobby for the time and funds to make the necessary changes before things went awry.
That’s fuckin wild and seems like a massive oversight.
Did they just not expect us all to live that long or did they just not think of it at all?
Depends on the “they”…
But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.
It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.
There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.
I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.
The Mayans figured a calendar that only went to 2012 would be good enough. And they were right, their civilization didn’t exist anymore in 2012. Only relevance their calendar system had in 2012 was that some people felt like it was a prophecy about the end of the world. Nope, just was an arbitrary date the Mayans rightly assumed would be far enough away it wouldn’t matter.
While I suppose you could make a date format that was infinitely expandable, it would take more processing power and is really unnecessary.
Anyway got until 2038 until we’ll have to deal with a popular date format running out of bits. We’ll probably be in some kind of mad max post apocalyptic world before then so it won’t matter.
You’re saying “imagine” a lot there.
Were there concrete examples of critical software that actually would’ve failed? At the time I remember there was one consultant that was on the news constantly saying everything from elevators to microwaves would fail on Y2K. Of course this was creating a lot of business for his company.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
And sure a lot of of software needed to be tested to be sure someone didn’t do something stupid. But a lot of it was indeed an exaggeration. You have to reset the time on your microwave after a power outage but not the date, common sense tells you your microwave doesn’t care about the year. And when a reporter actually followed up with the elevator companies, it was the same deal. Most software simply doesn’t just fail when it’s run in an unexpected year.
If someone wrote a time critical safety mechanism for a nuclear reactor that involved parsing a janky homebrew time format from a string then there’s some serious problems in that software way beyond Y2K.
The instances of the Y2K bug I saw in the wild, the software still worked, it just displayed the date wrong.
Y2K38 is the real scary problem because people that don’t understand binary numbers don’t understand it at all. And even a lot of people in the technology field think it’s not a problem because “computers are 64 bit now.” Don’t matter how many bits the processor has, it’s only the size that’s compiled and stored that counts. And unlike some janky parsed string format, unix time is a format I could see systems at power plants actually using.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
This comes to mind:
You don’t store dates as Unix time. Unix timestamps indicate a specific point in time. Dates are not a specific point in time.
You’re probably getting down voted because you asked here instead of a search engine, and many people think it’s common knowledge, and it was already answered in this thread.
Sometimes an innocent question looks like someone JAQing off.
It was a massive threat as it would break banking records and aircraft flight paths. Those industries spent millions to fix the problem. In 14 years(2038) we’ll have a similar problem with all 32bit computers breaking if they haven’t had firmware updates to store UTC time as a 64bit number composed of two 32bit numbers. Lots of medical, industrial, and government equipment will need to either be patched or replaced.
