Gregory's Server@tychotithonus @robertatcara Yep. Those of us who were there did a whole bunch of work precisely so that nothing happened, and we knew at the time that it would mean a lot of people would assume there wasn’t a problem in the first place. Such is the lot of the people who maintain critical infrastructure well, rather than letting it fail and “heroically” fixing it - no-one notices when you’re doing a good job.
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I see your point, though I must object in part - most of the IT people and programmers fixing the problem weren't the people who created it. I'd say that most of us "inherited" it. :D Not that I strongly blame the original programmers, either - it emerged organically for understandable reasons.  @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara I wouldn’t blame those early programmers at all. They were largely working within the constraints of very limited systems. I’d blame those in charge of budgets — bean-counters — who didn’t want to pay to refactor old systems, even decades after it was more feasible, to handle dates properly. Y2K is past us, but the fight to refactor and maintain “unprofitable” code remains.  @jeff @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara One engineering professor that taught us in the late 80's used to recommend occasionally doing something like the above cartoon, in business-critical, but non-safety-critical systems, as a way of reminding the people on the business-side of enterprises, why they should spend the money maintaining the infrastructure. :D  @marnanel @jeff @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara Three toots up in the thread. @BillySmith @jeff @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara thanks! Must be something my server has blocked @catch56 @jeff @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara Good days to take off work: * Feb 7, 2036: NTP 32-bit unsigned time stamp values will overflow * Jan 19, 2038: Unix Time 32-bit signed value will overflow * Nov 20, 2038: GPS week number rollover * Dec 31, 2078: Excel Date 16-bit value will overflow * Feb 7, 2106: Unix Time 32-bit unsigned value will overflow @jeff @tychotithonus @plaes @sinbad @robertatcara One of my first colleagues said they were through the same thing when 1969 was about to turn into year '0'. One would initially think they'd have fixed it properly then, but satellite communication was expensive, so the fix was to add one digit to the year and fix it for the next 30 years. #y2k  @jeff As a very early coder, you are so right about those constraints. In 1968 or so I was supporting suites of structural analysis program that had to operate in a max memory of 12,000 24-bit words (48 Kbytes) with no disk. We did 250-node grid and planeframes, or 100-node 3D structures. Matrix inversion (by Newton's decomposition) between 2 tape drives was a sight to see! I had to include an operator-console countdown to convince the Operators (!) not to cancel the jobs for apparent looping. Ye. Preventionist on our left. Reactionary on our right. Also works for describing the female/male work experience. @plaes @sinbad @tychotithonus @robertatcara This is the same phenomenon that we see in anti-vaccination movements. "Why are we giving all these shots for diseases no one gets anymore?"  @sinbad I was around back then and had to do similar testing and fixes for my company as well and we're far, far away from critical infrastructure. Huge shoutout to all the invisible hands that keep this globes critical infrastructure running; be it by doing routine tasks like verifying / updating the global DNS keys or more exotic things like the #Y2K overflow. |
@sinbad @tychotithonus @robertatcara