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Does anyone else remember the weirdness with dates in Excel files? On Windows, they used 1900 as the epoch, and on the mac they used 1904 (like the Mac itself)

Does anyone else remember the weirdness with dates in Excel files? On Windows, they used 1900 as the epoch, and on the mac they used 1904 (like the Mac itself), so if you got a spreadsheet from someone on a windows machine, dates would sometimes shift by 4 years. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/1900-and-1904-date-system https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/1... I haven't thought of that in years.

gresrun 6y ago
Excel also has a deliberate bug where it thinks 1900 is a leap year because they wanted compatibility with Lotus 123, where the bug was actually a bug! [0] [0] https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI?t=325 https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI?t=325
- chrisfinazzo 6y ago
  All because Joel Spolsky told Bill Gates it was there. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... Reading Joel’s post again, I suspect Bill’s style of review (having read the spec, made notes, and having a “F” counter for screwups) lends credence to the idea that he would have done exactly as Joel did and sought out Fries or some other senior Excel person if he didn’t get a satisfactory answer. As Joel laments, you can’t bullshit a programmer, and Gates was (underneath it all) a programmer.