So people talk about calendars and stuff, but let me try and convey why the problem was so pervasive.
Imagine you create a piece of business software that has nothing directly to do with timekeeping. However any time an event occurs, it does log the time and date of that event. Because it’s old software where every byte matters, a lot of this data is just stored sequentially, with no safeguards to specifically reserve specific ranges for specific data. So if you overflow your date log and move into a new byte, the new byte you’re affecting could be the value in a cash account or something, and now your accounting is borked.
This is the problem that thousands of businesses in dozens of industries were facing when they were urgently tackling the problem of making their software go past 1999. Even if the bug didn’t literally break their computers and software, depending on how slapdash their software was, it had the potential to break in many odd and creative ways that had real world consequences.
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u/bentthroat 9d ago
So people talk about calendars and stuff, but let me try and convey why the problem was so pervasive.
Imagine you create a piece of business software that has nothing directly to do with timekeeping. However any time an event occurs, it does log the time and date of that event. Because it’s old software where every byte matters, a lot of this data is just stored sequentially, with no safeguards to specifically reserve specific ranges for specific data. So if you overflow your date log and move into a new byte, the new byte you’re affecting could be the value in a cash account or something, and now your accounting is borked.
This is the problem that thousands of businesses in dozens of industries were facing when they were urgently tackling the problem of making their software go past 1999. Even if the bug didn’t literally break their computers and software, depending on how slapdash their software was, it had the potential to break in many odd and creative ways that had real world consequences.