I was considered “brave” and “crazy” for offering to work that shift. People were losing their minds. It was the first time I realized how gullible the general public was. I was the calm in the storm. I reminded them that air was not controlled by a computer and we would survive. It would be like “camping nursing.” Midnight -NOTHING- and people felt stupid. I’m ready for that feeling again. It was priceless.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (105)
sorted by:
But the computers could have gotten the date wrong.
You're telling me that didn't leave you terrified??
Lmao.
Well pretty much the exact same thing will happen in 2038, when Unix time hits the max signed integer.
It's not "could have", many of them did.
I got my computer in 1997. I was worried about Y2K compat, so I set the time to December 31 1999 at 12:58 PM, and waited to see what would happen. It rolled back to 1900. I then manually set the date to Jan 1 2000 at 7:00 AM, and played around with a bit, and found everything I used was working. So I knew when the time came, I would just need to manually correct the time, and everything else would work.
So at this point I knew that my personal stuff would have a minor inconvenience which would take a couple of seconds to fix, no big deal. I was mildly worried what if some major system somewhere went nuts from a similar issue, but thankfully none did. Whatever major systems out there that might have had an issue were fixed in time. When the time came, I heard some people yelling outside, but that was it. After the weekend, I fixed the time on my computer when I next used it and that was that.
The 2038 issue is more problematic. Operating systems that use 32-bit time will have no way deal with time after the seconds rollover. A few years ago, I checked a bunch of systems I have to see how they would handle it. All my newer systems are 64 bit and have no issue. Almost all the older operating systems I tested had time roll over and some programs acted weird, but nothing appearing to outright break except some music player. However, there was no way to actually set the time to be a correct later date. Once resetting the time to something positive (after 1970), that broken music player started working again.
The one exception to this was Mac OS X, I forget offhand which versions (and I haven't checked anything newer since then), when the time was hit, the system just froze. Rebooting the system did not work, as Mac OS X would not boot up. Had to figure out how to enter the EFI and change the time back before it would boot again. The EFI had the time frozen on the last second of 32 bit time.
Yes i know that many got the date wrong.
My point was that it was not the world ending, plane crashing event that it was made out to be.
And 2038 will be the same thing. Some computers get the date wrong and life continues as normal; Anything critical getting patched months beforehand. Nothing to freak the fuck out about, lol.
Well, in this case, perhaps even years before hand.
Windows has a 64 bit time function even on 32 bit systems. Applications just need to make sure to use it.
Other Operating Systems are currently in the midst of transitioning all their time interfaces to be 64 bit, even on 32 bit systems. Any application which makes use of a time related variable will do the right thing when recompiled.
The issue here will be with applications that are never recompiled, or use a 32 bit variable instead of a time variable, or are on Windows and continue to use the 32 bit time interface.