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Top-level
 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. 5 comments
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/ @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.)  @argv_minus_one @fatsam |
Gregory's Server
@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.