[Kosh]

How big of a problem would it really have been?

[Rick James]

Clicky.

The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K) was a notable computer bug resulting from the practice in early computer program design of representing the year with two digits. This time code ambiguity caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000 and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "...97, 98, 99..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Companies and organizations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems.

While no globally significant computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000, preparation for the Y2K bug had a significant effect on the computer industry. Countries that spent very little on tackling the Y2K bug (including Italy and South Korea) experienced as few problems as those that spent much more (such as the United Kingdom and the United States), causing some to question whether the absence of computer failures was the result of the preparation undertaken or whether the significance of the problem had been overstated.

[Kosh]

I know what the wiki says, I'm just asking for other people's opinions.

[Scotty]

....?

How bad would it have been?   

[Flipside]

In truth, it depends on what systems were being relied on and how heavily, for example, Y2K would have totally crippled the Fortran based code that ran the UK's telephone routing system, and left everyone unable to contact anyone else, that would have been serious.

[Turambar]

How big of a problem would it really have been?

this big.

[Scotty]

I'm feeling just a touch more optimistic than that.

In my picture there's at least someone still alive.


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[Rick James]

Y2K would have given us Clan heavy 'mechs? Coo.

[Polpolion]

Y2K would have given us Clan heavy 'mechs? Coo.

Damn straight.

[Narvi]

There would have been a rain of fish, because the Firewalls around the Sea of Sky would have failed, and yea, they would have been a great wailing and profileration of fish heads.

[Scotty]

Y2K would have given us Clan heavy 'mechs? Coo.

I couldn't find a picture of MechWarrior: Dark Age that didn't have said title written across it in blood red block letters.

[Snail]

This thread is funney

[Blue Lion]

Put in your own funny joke her.....

[Col. Fishguts]

Forget Y2K... you should start worrying about Y2K38.

[Nuke]

i dont know why it uses less memory to store the year in a decimal format anyway. i mean your typical unsigned 16 bit integer is good all the way till the year 65536. so i always said y2k was a hoax, long before it happened.

[portej05]

I remember dad was working at the health department here, and spent New Years 1999/2000 at work.
Apparantly medical equiment that did stuff with dates was particularly at risk.
To cut a long story short everything went smoothly. Except the door system which decided it couldn't let them out.

[blackhole]

i dont know why it uses less memory to store the year in a decimal format anyway. i mean your typical unsigned 16 bit integer is good all the way till the year 65536. so i always said y2k was a hoax, long before it happened.

That's because computer's don't store years, they store nanoseconds (or ticks).

[Nuke]

i cant think of many applications where computers need that kind of temporal precision. games comes to mind, weapons guidance systems avionics maybe. and most of that stuff is handled at the hardware level by a realtime clock chip. for database and financial applications i dont see that kind of precision being required. im sure there were a few applications where the bug needed fixing.

the y2k bug was something blown way out of proportion by people who didnt get what was going on. i can imagine a programmer being told by is boss to fix a non-existant problem with an application, and then using the oppritunity to twiddle his thumbs and work on coding one of his own projects while pretending to fix the bug for two years, and raking in the dough.

the other thing i didnt get about the y2k bug was that 2000 is a very round number, where computers like powers of two. i could understand a crash in 2048 for examle. before y2k i had some programming knowledge, but even now it still seems like a bunch of bs.

[Kosh]

the other thing i didnt get about the y2k bug was that 2000 is a very round number, where computers like powers of two.

The issue wasn't related to that, it was because dates were stored by their last two digits and it was assumed the first two would be "19", so when the year 2000 came the computer would think it was "1900" instead of "2000". I can see how that might mess up the tax system......

[Flipside]

i dont know why it uses less memory to store the year in a decimal format anyway. i mean your typical unsigned 16 bit integer is good all the way till the year 65536. so i always said y2k was a hoax, long before it happened.

You also have to remember that some of these systems were designed in the 70's and 80's where you had, if you were lucky, 64Kilobytes to play with, so they may well have compressed the year up into a portion of a 16-Bit number, say, 12 Bits for year and 4 Bits for month etc. And, as Kosh explains above, other systems only stored the last two digits.