Quote:
Originally Posted by dvarapala
There was a massive effort to refactor all kinds of ancient software in the months preceding Y2K - an effort that was successful for the most part. Thanks to that heroic effort the world didn't come to a screeching halt - which is why some people think there was never an issue.  |
LOL Ok, I'm a software developer and well remember this time period. For every minute I spent "refactoring software", I spent 60 minutes calming panicking customers. This mainly went like this:
Any software you are using that uses a date storage system that would break due to the change from 1999 to 2000, you'd know it was garbage already because of the other 10,000 ways it did stuff in a horrible fashion. Almost all commercial software, and yes this is somewhat short-sighted, is using the UNIX time_t structure for time storage, even if they don't know it. It is the number of seconds since January 1st 1970 in Greenwich England. On 16-bit and 32-bit platforms that becomes a problem in 2037 if the storage is a signed long integer (32-bits it will go negative then.) If it is defined as an unsigned integer, which it probably isn't, then you have until about 2104. However, this is all a moot point because all we have to do, at some point in the next 37 years or so, is fix the C-language libraries, or whatever libraries are being used.
BTW, for Linux and Microsoft C-language libraries, this was corrected very quickly, sometime around 2001-ish. We weren't even in a big hurry to do it.
Yes, some creaky software used two bytes to store just the last two digits of the year in some of their date formats. That software almost assuredly didn't using date/times stored like that in calculations. It was just used to store stuff like "Date of birth" or something. It wasn't used for aircraft navigation, financial transactions, or whatever critical type stuff you can think of because believe it or not, programmers aren't idiots and are always thinking about stuff like "Will this continue to work for the foreseeable lifetime of this software?"
The programs that were at issue were almost all either simply corrected or so old and outdated that there were plenty of other choices to replace it.