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
The thing I find interesting about the so called Y2K and all the hype about the year 2000 was in actual fact the same issue would take place in 2001, 2002 and so on and so on because we had the case from the previous century, of 1900 & 2000 but the same would apply the following year with 1901 & 2001 etc. etc. In the end it created a lot of business for computer programmers and annalists.
The real solution is/was to correctly store the year as a 4 digit number.
However, this is a difficult change as it might effect date calculations (potential overflows), the displaying of dates, and even the exchange of data between other systems.
Therefore, some software providers opted for a quick fix and simply declared years 00 to 19 actually meant 2000 to 2019. (In most software there is absolutely no need to handle dates between 1900 and 1919.) This has resulted in the Y2K2X problem in which software stopped working on 1 January 2020.
There will be a similar issue in 2038 when systems using 32bits to measure UNIX epoch time will run out of room. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)
Latest Answers