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From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] The 2038 bug...
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:09:33 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <950DAE25-BCAD-47EF-8FCE-A716271A3C25@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfoKV7A46ho3ORghFZEddROty3A-y2bn1VY0m=ipBxFF6w@mail.gmail.com>

I’ll be 67 for the 2038 bug.  Plenty of time to charge ridiculous hourly rates for being the old curmudgeon who still keeps a bunch of these systems running in his house for some combination of fun, nostalgia, and challenge.

My gut tells me that this is going to be far less of a big deal than 2000.

To (somewhat inaccurately) summarize: the problem with 2000 is that there was (and is, and will be in 2038) a whole bunch of COBOL doing the Really Important Stuff with two-digit year fields.

Whereas, time_t is basically internal, right?

Software is forever, but hardware, even with the best of intentions, after about 40 years or so, starts getting difficult to keep running (/pats Atari 2600 affectionately).

So if you *can* rebuild the software for a newer architecture…then suddenly there’s a wider time_t and the 33d bit is suddenly 1 but nothing breaks.  And if you can’t, you’re probably by that point running it in emulation anyway, at which point your emulation environment can know that 1/1/1970 is really whatever/2038, and your software is partying like it was just 1969.  If you have need to maintain linearly incrementing time in your application, you do the sliding window thing that we did with COBOL and Y2K.

Aside: the COBOL problem was made worse by IBM’s (IMHO very good) decision to provide problem-state instruction compatibility all the way from the (1964, IIRC) 360 to the present day, so for more than half a decade, you can just drop your Big Important COBOL onto the current incarnation of the 3x0/z and it’ll be perfectly happy.

Adam

  reply	other threads:[~2020-12-31 16:10 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 34+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-12-31  7:19 Dave Horsfall
2020-12-31  7:24 ` Niklas Karlsson
2020-12-31  8:10   ` arnold
2020-12-31 15:30     ` Warner Losh
2020-12-31 16:09       ` Adam Thornton [this message]
2020-12-31 16:12         ` Larry McVoy
2021-01-11  7:18           ` alan
2021-01-11 14:01             ` Stuart Remphrey
2020-12-31 18:36         ` Theodore Ts'o
2020-12-31 21:34           ` Warner Losh
2021-01-06 16:32       ` Dario Niedermann
2021-01-06 17:08         ` Henry Bent
2021-01-06 18:05           ` Dario Niedermann
2021-01-06 18:20           ` Michael Kjörling
2021-01-06 21:09         ` Dave Horsfall
2020-12-31 19:18     ` Bakul Shah
2021-01-04  8:22 ` Peter Jeremy via TUHS
2021-01-04  9:13   ` Angus Robinson
2021-01-04 21:49   ` Dave Horsfall
2021-01-04 21:56     ` Warner Losh
2021-01-05 18:05       ` Dan Cross
2021-01-06  7:21         ` Warner Losh
2021-01-07 22:56     ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-08  1:25       ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-01-10  6:56         ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-04  8:59 ` Sergio Pedraja
2021-01-07 22:50 ` Stuart Remphrey
2021-01-10  7:16 ` Valdimar Sigurdsson
2021-01-10  7:24   ` Niklas Karlsson
2021-01-10 10:15   ` Stuart Remphrey
2020-12-31 15:05 M Douglas McIlroy
2020-12-31 16:51 ` arnold
2020-12-31 23:31   ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-01-09  8:44 Norman Wilson

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