Meme Thread... no politics

25 years ago

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

25 years ago

My new boss at the time was a serious Y2K prepper. Like fully prepared to take his typical suburban house off grid for months.

He's probably still got supplies left over.

Duke said:

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

25 years ago

My new boss at the time was a serious Y2K prepper. Like fully prepared to take his typical suburban house off grid for months.

He's probably still got supplies left over.

 

I was selling backup power systems at the time. Diesel generators sets from 250 kW to 2 mW for business's. 1999 was a banner year because of the Y2K fear. People would buy anything they could find and pay any price.

2000 sucked for business. I was competing against all of the less than year old generator sets that people were dumping because nothing happened at Y2K. People were dumping them at 50 cents to the dollar. Some never even got permanent installations, just jury rigged in a parking lot.

i still look back at my commission statements from those two years and laugh.

And it became a nothing because of all the IT people frantically writing workarounds to shore up all the computers designed in the 70s to use two-digit years because who'd be using this thirty years in the future?

Some things got wholesale rewritten, some things got some inventive kludges to limp things along.  (Like, say, "2001" being stored as "19101" in the backend, for an example I heard.  No, I don't know how that works either, but it limped old legacy code along)

2038 is going to be more interesting.  That's when some systems that store time as a function of seconds since Jan 1 1970 or something will stack overflow.  And by interesting, I mean it'll be an...

epoch fail.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

And it became a nothing because of all the IT people frantically writing workarounds to shore up all the computers designed in the 70s to use two-digit years because who'd be using this thirty years in the future?

 

Some things got wholesale rewritten, some things got some inventive kludges to limp things along.  (Like, say, "2001" being stored as "19101" in the backend, for an example I heard.  No, I don't know how that works either, but it limped old legacy code along)

 

2038 is going to be more interesting.  That's when some systems that store time as a function of seconds since Jan 1 1970 or something will stack overflow.  And by interesting, I mean it'll be an...

epoch fail.

Bold of you to assume we will last that long.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

And it became a nothing because of all the IT people frantically writing workarounds to shore up all the computers designed in the 70s to use two-digit years because who'd be using this thirty years in the future?

 

Some things got wholesale rewritten, some things got some inventive kludges to limp things along.  (Like, say, "2001" being stored as "19101" in the backend, for an example I heard.  No, I don't know how that works either, but it limped old legacy code along)

 

2038 is going to be more interesting.  That's when some systems that store time as a function of seconds since Jan 1 1970 or something will stack overflow.  And by interesting, I mean it'll be an...

epoch fail.

My inner nerd comes out: all the systems that I am aware of (linux, *BSD) have switched to keeping track of epoch time using a 64-bit variable.

I keep reading that as e-pooch.

alphahotel said:

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

And it became a nothing because of all the IT people frantically writing workarounds to shore up all the computers designed in the 70s to use two-digit years because who'd be using this thirty years in the future?

 

Some things got wholesale rewritten, some things got some inventive kludges to limp things along.  (Like, say, "2001" being stored as "19101" in the backend, for an example I heard.  No, I don't know how that works either, but it limped old legacy code along)

 

2038 is going to be more interesting.  That's when some systems that store time as a function of seconds since Jan 1 1970 or something will stack overflow.  And by interesting, I mean it'll be an...

epoch fail.

My inner nerd comes out: all the systems that I am aware of (linux, *BSD) have switched to keeping track of epoch time using a 64-bit variable.

There's a whole universe of embedded real time OSs that no one ever had any reason to update the hosted apps to 64 bit time.  
 

We refer to it as the "epoch-alypse."

January 14, 2038, 3:14 UTC 

^They sell whole pallets of Faygo