by DomusAlbion » Sun 27 Apr 2008, 16:10:10
PStarr is closer to the truth about the Y2K problem. It was for the most part a problem with mainframe computers and embedded systems and NOT an MS Windows problem. Back in the days when I worked on mainframes (before 1980) computer memory (internal and storage) was very expensive (A mainframe with 2 megabytes of memory could easily cost $2 million). Every byte of information that could be encoded in shorthand was. So we had a special date field that used what was called a julian format, that is YYDDD, which was a 2 digit year and a 3 digit day. This could even be stored in 3 bytes. So it was used everywhere. The problem being that when the year turned to 2000 you had a date of all zeros which would totally screw up date compares. I remember bringing up this problem when I was at Lockheed and was told not to worry about it as the "system will be rewritten long before then." Well of course it wasn't, there or at countless other companies.
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