1985 Usenet About Y2k 406
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!"
Other Interesting Moments in Usenet History (Score:2, Interesting)
Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announ
There's some really great ones in there, including Linus announcing Linux, Microsoft soliciting for new 'wizards', a thread about the chernobyl accident, and so on.
Re:Back to the future (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's a fairly trivial task to make the actual corrections to the programs, it most certainly was not a trivial task to:-
1) Make sure that EVERY y2k bug was identified
2) Recompile/retest/re-rollout many thousands of affected programs.
3) Persuade all suppliers/customers/trading partners to fix the systems.
In the end, the world didn't end *because* we had pulled out the stops and fixed the bugs. It's worth noting though that examples of every type of predicted failure did actually occur.
The originating article here dates from 1985 - the problem had been identified with 15 years to go. Why were non-compliant PCs still being built in 1997? Why were software houses *still* producing non-compliant code in 1995?
Re:Shouldn't be a problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Attitude (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that there's anything wrong with that attitude, but it does indicate two things: One, that even hardcore geeks (i.e. people who had email addresses in 1985) can be complacent about things that seem a long way off (rather than fixing it long before it'll become a problem, as would be "ideal", for suitable definitions of ideal); and two, that computers were not the societally pervasive force that they've become in the last decade. A lot of the reason people didn't see the Y2K bug having that much potential impact that far in advance was because this kind of omnipresence of computers was just beginning. (In AD 1985, personal computerization was beginning...) These days, even an average Joe on the street would probably be astonished to hear that any kind of, say, large utility wasn't thoroughly computerized, but in 1985, such a revelation would have been met with mostly blank stares.
Go see the list of critical dates (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, Stockton's page had me occupied for a few good hours. It's quite a read. It has great stuff on it, like the base filedate for Windows "Last Modified" calculation, when 16-bit BSDs die, when NTFS fails, etc. LOTS of good dates there.
I even submitted my newly-discovered UNIAPI_TIME epoch value. It was much more exciting that submitting my transmeta-based Gateway/AOL Webpad's BogoMips value to the BogoMips mini-HOWTO [tldp.org].
-B
Re:This is Usenet?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
back-in-the-day-life-was-great dept. (Score:4, Interesting)
Here we see a Usenet thread, with thoughtful and interesting responses from knowledgeable, experienced people at universities and research institutes. No flame wars, no snot-nosed kids from AOL, no spamming, no hot grits or Natalie Portman, no ranting about how Usenet is a mysterious cabal of Illuminati scheming to rob our freedoms and kill our firstborn.
I wasn't around in the nerdy, cliquish days of 1985 (I'm not that old!), but I did see the early 90's -- when Usenet was still a respectable hangout for serious and informative disussion -- dissolve into the mid 90's -- when all hell broke loose. It was exciting, and only logical, to see such a useful medium become so popular, but now the spammers and ranters and schemers have completely taken over. There are still a few pearls in there these days, but you have to go look for them in that enormous, stinking pile of shit.
I used to use the 'vi' binding in 'nn', which gave me a full curses screen to type my posts. Now I type Slashdot comments in this puny little HTML textarea. What has the world come to?
Re:Oh, the memories... (Score:3, Interesting)
19099 : 12,300 matches
19100 : 531,000 matches
19101 : 537,000 matches
19102 : 518,000 matches
19103 : 71,900 matches
There's a massive number of systems out there still showing April 24th, 19102 at the top of the page. That's 2 1/2 years after the bug.
Yeah, it was all a hoax and never affected any machine.
Re:Randal L. "Perl Jedi" Schwartz? (Score:3, Interesting)
Guess I should've stayed in Python Land, where both the newbie books and the language are written by the same old Guido.