I understand what the general issue was for y2k. Computer systems that only recorded the last two digits of the year would reset to 01 Jan 1900 and cause issues for banks and other important records. My question is how did people fix the problem and test computers to make sure they were good? Was it a lot of manually typing in shell commands or could IT folks implement a patch with a floppy disk or some other removable media? How do you get a computer that was built to work with a certain date format to recognize dates in a new format?
In: 4
By going through and changing all the date formats to have four digit years.
When most of these programmes were written it was the 80s or even the 70s. It was a known issue, but the developers were just not expecting their systems to be used for that long.
They used a two digit year because every single byte was precious. Any memory saving measure was used.
By the time the year 2000 rolled around the memory available could be measured in gigabytes rather than kilobytes.
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