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Y2K, why didnt it work


gaara

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Because computers are not that dumb!!!

 

Many systems were updated before it happened and the computers that weren't, well many just rolled on to 2000. The problem was with non-updated systems that only used two digits for the years and after 99 the computers just went to 00... end of story, not much of a problem!

 

In 1997, a computer at Marks & Spencer ordered tons of perfectly good food to be destroyed when an application program interpreted some expiration dates as 1902 instead of 2002. Instead of five more years of shelf life, the program calculated that this food was 96 years old and ordered it destroyed. A similar problem happened to a U.S. manufacturer of freeze-dried food.

 

It was not a brand new problem, a long time in advance when computer programmers were programming programes that predict stuff in the future over a 10, 20, 30 or even 50 year time period, the Y2K bug was "foreseen" many many years before it happened and so by the time it got Y2K itself all the programmes already knew what to do as they had been programmed to do it because of mistakes made when predicty programmes screwed up 30 years before the event itself!

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UNIX: Stores dates as 32 bit integers that denote how many seconds since UTC on Jan 1st 1970 so UNIX won't fail until Jan 18th 2037 (by which time there'll be a patch!) [it would otherwise fail when all the 32 integers are 9s]

 

DOS, win3.1, win95 work until 2018

 

win98, winNT and higher can deal with all 21st century dates

 

68000-based Macintosh no probs until the year 2040

 

And also not many computer programmes actually care what the date is!

 

(Data found all over the net using google)

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also theres an option during windows xp set up, that basically asks you in what way windows xp should interpret two digit numbers. eg, i believe i left mine set at the default of interpriting two digit numbers as a value inbetween 1938 and 2037. on the off chance that im still using this computer in 2037, i assume i could change the setting and tell my pc to interpret 2digit numbers as, for eg, 1950 - 2049. tada! no more probs.

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thanks alot for ur repsones.

 

so that was it. the worst thing that wudve happend was what u described.

 

i thort it was alot more hyped up about. like satellites would fall from the sky and stuff. where did this orginate?

 

cheers

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Some of the people I work with spent an awful lot of time leading up to the millenium working on the Y2K problem, mostly dealing with bespoke [financial] systems running in mainframe environments... and they did their job. Everything was fine.

 

In some companies, these systems had been around for decades, the programmers who wrote them had moved on or retired, and system documentation was variable. But then, checking millions of lines of code is fun - isn't it?

 

I understand this kind of system can be the most valuable asset a company will have, so even a hint that something might undermine it... well, you can see how people got worried.

 

Sure, the hype was - well - hype, but someone somewhere had to assess each and every system.

 

I understand that - mostly - the problem was not only how dates were represented, but how the original programmer chose to calculate the difference between two dates. And then, of course, there's what happens in leap years, and the exceptions...

 

Nothing fell out of the sky that I know of, and very few gliches were reported that I remember.

 

But then, they wouldn't be... would they?

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I was working in a hospital biochemistry lab over the millenium. In the lab we had a thick Y2K action plan folder, all the necessary material for submitting handwritten reports for urgent blood test results and even a couple of torches and spare batteries! I felt that the torches should really have had a Y2K Compliance Certificate as well, but...

 

We had TWO computer failures that night.

 

One occurred as a result of the all the computers and chemistry analysers being shutdown whilst midnight passed - when we rebooted everything one of the collating computers hanged when it restarted and then wouldn't work until all the data from 1999 was deleted manually. I guess the Y2K compliance patch had expected the computer to be running and to deal with the glitch itself and we were undone by our own paranoia.

 

The other glitch was even sillier; the new security system with card readers and electronic locks on all the doors crashed. Since we'ed shutdown the lab, all the staff had gone to the canteen so when we returned we were all locked out. The sillly bit was that the security system crashed at midnight on the 31st December for the next two years!!!

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Where I work we go "yelled at" at some point in 1999 for not dealing with the problem. Some bean-counter had decided that we hadn't spent enough money earmarked for Y2K, so therefore we must not be dealing with the isue.

 

We did have one public glitch that made the news. A perl script that displayed the year on one web page didn't get modified. It appended the two-digit year to 19, so it was the year 19100 until it got fixed. Had nothing to do with operations, though, just a visual display, so it was a pretty low-priority thing.

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It appended the two-digit year to 19, so it was the year 19100 until it got fixed. Had nothing to do with operations, though, just a visual display, so it was a pretty low-priority thing.
I still use an old DOS program at my work that has a similar problem...

 

It tells me that today is 5-02-1051 but in all other ways it works fine.

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Nothing fell out of the sky that I know of' date=' and very few gliches were reported that I remember.

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didn't mir lose power, though? perhaps it was just cuz mir was junk.

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