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Remember 20 years ago when Y2K happened and the grid went down?


GuyBeardmane

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it's funny because y2k was actually a problem, but not in the way that they blew it out to be.

think about this:

imagine you have a system of record that keeps dates in a 2 digit format (eg: 1-1-97, 1-2-97, whatever). now imagine that the date flips over to 1-1-00. well if you have records in your system, how are you going to know if something happened on 1-1-1900 or 1-1-2000? you won't, you'd need to support a 4 digit date and that was the problem. a LOT of legacy code only support 2 digit dates. people worked around the clock to update legacy code so that there wouldn't be any problems.

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6 hours ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Probably since computers as we know them didn't exist until like, what, the 1960s?

And no data before that time like historical or genealogical data could ever be possibly entered into a computer at a later point like a birthdate for a patient being received in the ER?

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2 hours ago, Naraku4656 said:

And no data before that time like historical or genealogical data could ever be possibly entered into a computer at a later point like a birthdate for a patient being received in the ER?

Maybe I don't fully understand this bug.... because the computer's "internal clock" or whatever only used two digits to determine what year it was, a user couldn't enter a four digit date into a database by way of typing it with the keyboard?

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1 minute ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Maybe I don't fully understand this bug.... because the computer's "internal clock" or whatever only used two digits to determine what year it was, a user couldn't enter a four digit date into a database by way of typing it with the keyboard?

If I recall correctly, it has something to do with the number of bits whatever program makes available for storing dates.  Two digits is not the same as two bits (1 or 0), and when storing that four digit number, you have to expand the number of allotted spaces in memory for storage.  It's a little difficult to describe if you haven't learned some form of coding, even BASIC.

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6 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Maybe I don't fully understand this bug.... because the computer's "internal clock" or whatever only used two digits to determine what year it was, a user couldn't enter a four digit date into a database by way of typing it with the keyboard?

no, it all had to do with code. let's say you try to enter data in a program that only accepted dates in 2 digit years, you couldn't enter a 4 digit date because the program wasn't equipped to handle it. so the best you could do was enter in 00 for a year, but that's a problem because you have no idea if someone's birth year (for example) is 2000 or 1900

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2 minutes ago, scoobdog said:

If I recall correctly, it has something to do with the number of bits whatever program makes available for storing dates.  Two digits is not the same as two bits (1 or 0), and when storing that four digit number, you have to expand the number of allotted spaces in memory for storage.  It's a little difficult to describe if you haven't learned some form of coding, even BASIC.

that's the more technical explanation. i was trying for more of a layman approach

Edited by Naraku4656
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2 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Maybe I don't fully understand this bug.... because the computer's "internal clock" or whatever only used two digits to determine what year it was, a user couldn't enter a four digit date into a database by way of typing it with the keyboard?

Video game arcades used to have these "Biorhythm" machines.  You enter your birthday & another date for the day you wanted your biorhythms and it would spit out a card with your physical, emotional, & mental biorhythms.  I entered a few dates on a lark, including one for my 40th birthday.  All the cards came out fine with sine wave like printouts...except the one for my 40th birthday - which was flat-lined across the board.  It wasn't until the stories about Y2K broke that I figured out what happened.  The years were all 2 digit and my 40th was after 01/01/00.

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2 minutes ago, Naraku4656 said:

that's the more technical explanation. i was trying for more of a layman approach

I'm just guessing that he hasn't ever coded, so the concept of defining a variable inside of the program itself isn't something he's considering.

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4 minutes ago, scoobdog said:

I'm just guessing that he hasn't ever coded, so the concept of defining a variable inside of the program itself isn't something he's considering.

columnar formats were also problematic. if you had CHAR(2) you had to not only have extra space to make ALL of the data CHAR(4) but now you have to define what the previous data meant. so there was a lot of interpretation and sometimes incorrect assumptions that needed to be made

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19 minutes ago, scoobdog said:

I'm just guessing that he hasn't ever coded, so the concept of defining a variable inside of the program itself isn't something he's considering.

ACTUALLY from 2015 to 2016 I took several coding classes at the local community college and the explanation made sense.

I was correct in that I didn't fully understand what the bug was about in the first place. I thought it was just about the computer time-stamping things, not users entering in dates into databases.

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Cool.  The bug was sensationalized to be sure, in part because there are a few critical systems (such as air-traffic control) where dates are a critical element.  The reality is that including values for centuries and millennia isn't as important for the vast majority of systems, and ultimately amounted to minor inconveniences for end users.  For those tasked with making sure the programs were functioning properly, though, it was an immense headache.

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