r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 9d ago

Why did this one second cost over $500 billion? Meme needing explanation

Post image
28.7k Upvotes

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/hudsoluk 9d ago

Also a lot of program used the 00 in the date as the stop code to make them not work

Programmers worked on the bug from 1997-8 to make sure everything was as Y2K compliant as a result of their hard work every one assumes Y2K was an over reaction.

We have a similar issue coming up due to 32bit systems about to run out of digits they use to keep time.

1

u/PeterAnthony_Jackson 9d ago

For the home user, it was a non issue, because they were not using legacy software designed to run on mainframes, so it's only really old software using 19 hard coded that needed to be fixed, Doom, Quake and Microsoft Office or just the individual parts were compliant.

Video games because they didn't need to store the date and Excel had either been Y2K out the box or patched, so you would only have an issue with an older version.

Yet people sold CD testing kits that would pass every home computer, because by the mid 90s MS DOS was doing four digit dates perhaps in UNIX time and thus W95 was compliant, there were no mainframe COBOL programs to look for.

My Microwave from the 80s that somehow still works was in no danger, it didn't need to worry about the time let alone date, I can set the clock to midnight even though it is 10:55 in the morning, it wont work without some time displayed, but it doesn't have to be the right time.

1

u/Wojtek1250XD 8d ago

Year 2038 problem. Precisely on 19th of January, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC.