1985 Usenet About Y2k

Anonymouse Cow writes "Here's a trip down memory lane (for some of you "oldsters"). Google's newsgroups has the first usenet mention of the Y2K bug... in 1985! Quote: "I have a friend that raised an interesting question that I immediately tried to prove wrong. He is a programmer and has this notion that when we reach the year 2000, computers will not accept the new date." Check out the replies!"

Re:not Y2K but....

[qubit64]

actually you should be worried about 2038 before you start worrying about 3000

2400 *IS* a leap year

[pgpckt]

Err...no, 2400 IS a leap year!

To review:

2000: leap year
2100: not a leap year
2200: not a leap year
2300: not a leap year
2400: leap year

15 years and...

[DaphunK]

We all still waited to the LAST minute to fix the bugs :) I know that the accounting software company that I work for was up very late many nights in December 1999, upgrading UNIX servers and program files so that the "world" would not come to an end in the Oil Marketers pocketbooks. J

POSIX xtime to the rescue!!!!

[dananderson]

Fortunately, some people have thought it through. There's a proposed POSIX standard, xtime, to create a new time type, and new functions, to handle a 64 bit time type (in a 32 bit world!).

The xtime struct contains:
int_fast64_t sec;
int_fast32_t nsec;

In the 64-bit world, it's no problem--time_t is defined as a long long (64 bits).

wrong :)

[Anonymous Coward]

The first mention of the y2k bug was banks in 1975 calculating 25 year mortgages that ran into problems then with it.

They understood opensource advantages in 85

[prockcore]

One of the replies:

"If you are really worried about timewrap breaking programs in subtle ways,
then set your clock ahead now, and find the bugs. That will give you several
years to fix them. If you are binary only, you might NEED several years
to get you vendor to fix them!"

See! Even in 1985, they understood that opensource bugs get fixed faster than properietary software! :)

Re:What would really be cool...

[topham]

I have had the pleasure of working with software which took into account 5 digit yers and failed to pass Y2K testing.

The software was for an archialogical database and stored the year photos were taken as 2 digits, while other data was stored in a 5 digit year field representing BC, AD or BP. BP related to carbon dating and is the number of years before 1950. 1950 is 0 BP.

It really was an odd piece of software.

Re:And now Y2038

[dananderson]

Interesting essay on the Y2038 problem, and probably human nature, at Roger Wilcox's Y2038 page, http://pw1.netcom.com/~rogermw/Y2038.html [netcom.com]

Randal L. "Perl Jedi" Schwartz?

[PsyQ]

This post is on Google's list of memorable posts [google.com]. It's the first mention of Star Wars, Episode 6 [google.com]. I think the probability that this is THE Randal L. Schwartz is very high.

How cool is that? He even scores for quintuple Nerdhood by:

1. Being on Usenet in 1982
2. Having his Usenet post on Google's memorable postings list
3. Being a Star Wars geek
4. Being a Star Wars geek ON Usenet, IN 1982!
5. Writing his own scripting language

And who knows, maybe that page at Google was generated by HIS scripting language ;)

Re:Henry Spencer

[PD]

Henry Spencer is one of the great fixtures of Usenet. He worked at the University of Toronto I think, and was a sys admin/programmer/demigod sort of person. He's had his hands in all sorts of great and wonderful things that we take for granted nowadays.

A design choice, not a bug

[myawn]

I worked in banking during the late 70s and early 80s, and we were well aware at the time that there was an issue with dates that would require changes to software before the year 2000.

People seem to think that this was some unexpected oversight; it was nothing of the sort. Given the cost of storage at the time, and the millions of records that had to stored with one or more date fields, it was a purely economic decision to save money at the time. I don't have the numbers needed to do the math, but I suspect it was actually the right choice. If you compare the cost of additional required storage to the eventual rework cost, discounting for time, maybe it doesn't look so stupid. Especially since many programs really did cease to be used before the problem arose (although probably far fewer than we would have predicted)

We all joked at the time that, along about 1998 or 1999, we would take jobs in other industries until the changeover was complete.

INTARWEB to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

From Critical dates [demon.co.uk]:
# 3E11 approx. - UNIX 64-bit signed time_t fails (seconds from 1970) - A.D. 292,277,026,596-12-04 Sun 15:30:08 GMT (checked).
Even though I have no idea if it's right or not, the string "(checked)" makes me feel better. No one would lie on tha intarweb, right?

Bob Bemer

[m_chan]

Bob Bemer [bobbemer.com] is credited with the first world-wide publication of the Y2k problem.

R.W.Bemer, "What's the Date?", Editorial, Honeywell Computer J. 5, No. 4, 205-208, 1971

Here is a funny quote from him:

Q: So whom do you blame?

A: Richard Nixon.

Q: What did he do?

A:I proposed a national computer year back in 1970. I wanted to model it after the IGY [the International Geophysical Year was from July 1957 to December 1958]. I could see that people were not prepared for the influx of computer usage that was sure to come. I thought that if we all put our minds to it and planned ahead a little bit, maybe it would be easier. Year 2000 was just one of the issues we would have addressed.

President Nixon was very suspicious of computers, though, and wouldn't sign off on it. Without his proclamation we couldn't do it. I think he'll go down in history along with King Canute.

He has a rather impressive list of accomplishment to go along with those tidbits, including prior art [bobbemer.com] for the British Telecom patent fiasco [techlawjournal.com].

A pretty neat dude.

y2038

[DunbarTheInept]

I predict the y2038 problem won't take much effort to fix. Most (good) programs these days are designed without hardcoding the exact bytesize of things, and instead using system-supplied types. For example, we don't say:
char timebuff[4]; /* 32 bits */
...
*((int*)timebuff) = time(NULL);
...
Instead we do stuff like this:
time_t timebuff;
...
timebuff = time(NULL);
...
When the system type for time_t is change to something with more than 32 bits, the code just needs a recompile and voilla - it handles dates past 2038. The work is going to be in making sure every program gets recompiled, and in converting saved files that have the date already stored in 32 bits. The ugly part will be if your system depends on third-party stuff in binary form only that you can't upgrade for whatever reason.

Note, I didn't say the problem will be nonexistant, just that it will be easier to fix than y2k.

Re:UUCP?

[PatJensen]

UUCP, also known as Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol used serial lines and dial up connections to exchange e-mails and Usenet posts, or any other type of files. It was later adapted to support live TCP/IP connections but was definitely the defacto standard for "networking". UUCP was supported on most Vax systems and Unix variants. There were even DOS UUCP stacks for offline mail and Usenet reading (look for Waffle UUCP - was quite cool back in the day).

To exchange information to other hosts, before protocols like DNS became mainstream there was a public Systems repository. The addresses indicated showed the path that a mail or post would take before it would be delivered. A single post make take 5 modem calls between hosts at varying times of the day (depending on long distance costs) before it would show up. It definitely wasn't as fast as it is now over a live TCP/IP network.

I still believe that some newspaper wire companies and stuff still use UUCP to dial up and move news articles. UUCP was cool for its time. As much as people clamored for lots of bandwidth and a nice static IP, it was cool enough just to BE a UUCP node. UUCP was much like later protocols like FidoNet - but UUCP used Arpa compatible mail headers so it could be used for sites that had live Arpa network connectivity.

Anyways, hope that helps. You old-timers that know more then me feel free to correct me. I'll go back to listening to the Dodgers Game.

-Pat

Re:Anybody Notice the IBM reference?

[BrainInAJar]

Also, did anyone see a post with a signature that said "linus" on it? I think I did, and was wondering what that referred to in 1985

that's just his bang path. Evidently "linus" was a large-ish machine in 1984 (probably a system named after the owner/IT guy who had the name of linus)