Remember This?……
I was working on a job estimate and ran across this in the job specifications…… I wonder if they still think there’s a chance of a problem from the Y2K bug seven years after the fact, which really ended-up not being that big of a problem in the first place?……
“Year 2000 (Y2K) Compliance: Computer software for scheduling shall be capable of accurately processing, sequencing, calculating, transmitting, and receiving date data from, into, and between all dates before, though, and after January 1, 2000, including leap-year calculations…….
I know I stayed up all night on that New Year’s Eve watching the New Year come in from all over the world on PBS…… Not one major malfunction…… I was kinda disappointed, although, I really didn’t want anything seriously bad to happen, but, there was lots of hype about everything going to “Hell in a Hand basket”…..
May 31st, 2007 at 8:47 am
I always found it a bit odd that we would have a problem with 2000: to introduce a decimal error to a binary machine seems oddly byzantine.
You’ll have another chance to sit in fear before the TV in 2038. Many computer systems keep track of the date as the number of seconds since 1 January 1970, and if they use a signed 32-bit number for this, then the clock will roll over sometime in early 2038.
Of course, by then everyone should be using 64-bit numbers (at least), and if we’ve moved to signed 64-bit quantities we shouldn’t have problems until the year 292271025015.
June 16th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I was on-call that night for the software company I worked for at the time. We got one false call at 9:36pm (Seattle time). And then I got a call at 3am with a real problem. Fortunately it was mostly cosmetic. We, and I expect most companies, worked very hard for the preceding 6 months to make sure things would be smooth.