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Daniel Keys Moran's posts Post Back to profile
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Leeloo

@fatsam
That is a bad example, because y2k WAS massively overhyped.

Everything with integrated circuits was supposed to stop working. Computers, VCRs even the timers people use for their christmas decorations.

Pretty much none of that got updates, and yet the calendar changed to 2000 with people watching their VCR happily continue flashing 12:00.

My Commodore 64 has two of the affected chips with a two digit date, and last I checked it still works.

And the timers for christmas decorations are even worse, they run out of digits every 24 hours. The more expensive ones after 7*24 hours.

Yes, a lot of work was done, but the other 90% really WAS hype. And that stuff was way more visible than mainframes and cobol programs.

3 June at 12:59 | Wall-to-wall | Open on techhub.social
7 comments
argv minus one

@leeloo

Yeah, consumer electronics were little affected. By the time microcomputers became common in the 1980s, it was already well known that a two-digit year wasn't going to suffice for long, so for the most part, they were Y2K compliant from the start.

But the machines keeping track of people's bank balances or the status of a nuclear power plant were much older, and programmed at a time when even a single byte of memory was scarce and valuable.

@fatsam

3 June at 15:49 | Open on mstdn.party
Leeloo

@argv_minus_one @fatsam
Incorrect, we had 486 PCs that didn't handle the rollover, that's much later than 1980.

But they didn't break, they just showed the wrong date until set manually. Just like the C64 I mentioned - the C64 had no battery, so the date would start at zero every time you turned the computer on, and nobody bothered setting the clock in the first place.

Same with the VCRs, the flashing 12:00 indicated that people didn't bother setting the clock.

Financial software needs to know the date for things like calculating interest, but most consumer stuff simply didn't care.

@argv_minus_one @fatsam
Incorrect, we had 486 PCs that didn't handle the rollover, that's much later than 1980.

But they didn't break, they just showed the wrong date until set manually. Just like the C64 I mentioned - the C64 had no battery, so the date would start at zero every time you turned the computer on, and nobody bothered setting the clock in the first place.

3 June at 16:21 | Open on techhub.social
argv minus one

@leeloo

I'm surprised you had a 486 PC without a battery-backed hardware real-time clock. I was under the impression they all did. Mine did. It knew quite well what time it is when powered on (unless the battery died).

Indeed, a lot of 486 motherboards today are inoperable because the battery leaked and its corrosive electrolyte has damaged the board.

The original IBM PC didn't have a battery-backed RTC, though. That one did require you to type in the current time at power on.

1/

@fatsam

3 June at 17:29 | Open on mstdn.party
argv minus one

@leeloo

Anyway, some RTCs had a century register and some didn't. wiki.osdev.org/CMOS#Century_Re

Some RTCs with a century register suffered from a bug where it wouldn't actually be incremented. dell.com/community/en/conversa 🤦‍♂️

Not sure about my 486. It was powered on and running Linux when the century rolled over. If the RTC did have an incrementation bug, it would've been corrected automatically; resetting the RTC was part of the shutdown sequence.

2/end

@fatsam

@leeloo

Anyway, some RTCs had a century register and some didn't. wiki.osdev.org/CMOS#Century_Re

Some RTCs with a century register suffered from a bug where it wouldn't actually be incremented. dell.com/community/en/conversa 🤦‍♂️

3 June at 17:29 | Open on mstdn.party
Daniel Keys Moran

@argv_minus_one @leeloo I owned an original IBM PC. You could, and I did, buy an expansion board with more RAM and a battery-backed clock on it, though. (Serial port as well, I vaguely recall.)

3 June at 17:43 | Open on mstdn.social
Leeloo

@argv_minus_one @fatsam
I've reworded that - it was the Commodore 64 that didn't have a battery backed clock. Sorry, that could be read both ways, bad wording on my part.

3 June at 18:08 | Open on techhub.social
Jeff Shaffer CBET, ret

@leeloo
Two issues I remember being resolved at the hospital I was working at involved remediation, one was a machine in nuclear medicine that would have shut down, delaying access and treatment to patients the next day (we just changed the date to 10 years earlier iirc) and the other was the date stamp on the ICU’s central station monitor, which printed time on the ECG recorder, used for diagnostic and legal documentation. In that case, the vendor provided a patch we installed in the software.
@fatsam

@leeloo
Two issues I remember being resolved at the hospital I was working at involved remediation, one was a machine in nuclear medicine that would have shut down, delaying access and treatment to patients the next day (we just changed the date to 10 years earlier iirc) and the other was the date stamp on the ICU’s central station monitor, which printed time on the ECG recorder, used for diagnostic and legal documentation. In that case, the vendor provided a patch we installed in the software.

3 June at 19:01 | Open on sfba.social
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