17 ms·

Ask HN: What is the oldest, still supported OS?

180 points by abrax3141 5y ago

I recently discovered that TSOS, an old Univac OS that I used (and loved!) in the mid 1970's and first released in 1968 by RCA, is still supported (although the name has changed) as Fujitsu's BS2000 OS. Unix was released a year after that (1969). Is there something that beats these?

p_l 5y ago
Master Control Program of Burroughs Large Systems fame was first released in 1961 - latest release is from May 2021
- abrax3141 5y ago
  Okay, seems like that's the one to beat!
- bombcar 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP and there's even a link to the latest release notes: https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP-20.0/82312182-000/82312182-000.pdf https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...
ElevenLathe 5y ago
OS/360 dates to 1966. I believe z/OS in theory still provides compatibility back to applications of that vintage, though AFAIK it is a separate codebase.
- akandiah 5y ago
  Fun fact: z/OS is now emulated on Red Hat Linux nowadays for "new" deployments.
  - tgflynn 5y ago
    What exactly do you mean by that ? Are you talking about an IBM emulation product that runs on RH Linux ?
- retrac 5y ago
  Z/OS is directly descended from OS/360. It's just a renaming. And yes, it continues to have almost complete binary compatibility back to 1966. I know for a fact that the IBM Fortran compiler from 1972 runs unmodified on z/OS today. Just pipe the 80 column EBCDIC data representing punch card images into the virtual punch card reader and off you go.
  - p_l 5y ago
    There was a big rewrite around MVS, but z/OS to this day executes a lot of code in 24bit address mode of S/360[1], and well, OS/360 code should mostly just run [1] Easy to observe when running z/OS under Hercules, as one of the console modes shows the CPU address size mode. A lot of the time during bootup of basic ADCD you'll see 24, a bit less 31, and rarely 64
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      31 bits ought to be enough for anyone.
      - p_l 5y ago
        At least on z/OS, executable code still needs to be in lower 31bits space
    - monocasa 5y ago
      If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it's broke just a little, someone probably depends on it for compat.
      - gjvc 5y ago
        https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
  - chefkoch 5y ago
    > into the virtual punch card reader as someone to young to have seen punch cards live this sounds really strange.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It gets crazier. At least back in the 1970s, you used to be able to emulate 7090 (IIRC) software on System/360. So if you have a 7090 program from the 1950s, you may be able to still run it today on z/OS, because you can probably run the 1970s-era emulator.
  - skissane 5y ago
    From what I’ve gathered, the IRS was using IBM’s 7074 emulator in production under z/OS to run some very old applications written in 7074 assembly-they might have finally stopped by now, but they were still doing it as recently as 5 years ago.
Jerry2 5y ago
The oldest one I know is PDP-11. It's still being used in nuclear power plants and many plants will continue using it until at least 2050 (maybe even longer if they remain working). [1] PDP-11 was released in 1970 so your TSOS find is even older. I'm sure there's something even older than these two that's being used by various gov orgs and industrial systems. There's plenty of small consulting firms that support ancient systems. These contracts provide them with steady and stable income. [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep...
- sloaken 5y ago
  PDP-11 Assembly language is just beautiful, well compared to most other assembly languages. I highly recommend it if you are trying to learn the concept of doing assembly language as a 'trainer' language. Not practical these days but a great way to learn.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Used != supported especially for systems that are not network-connected. Also the PDP-11 is a minicomputer series. There were a bunch of operating systems from DEC and others that ran on it. Certainly there are consultants who support ancient system but they probably have limited (if any) access to the OS source code--though they can probably patch to a limited degree.
  - cptnapalm 5y ago
    BSD 2.11 is still getting patched by Steve Schultz, last I saw.
    - paulmd 5y ago
      Apropos of nothing but this is one of the fun bits about FreeBSD, you can trace a lineage back through the AT&T Research Unix days. The oldest (known) surviving code in FreeBSD dates back to November 1974, committed by Ken Thompson. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-oldest-surviving-code-in-a-2016-version-of-Freebsd-Unix-lines-114-118_fig12_306070534 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-oldest-surviving-cod...
nix0n 5y ago
Possibly Burroughs MCP[0] from 1961, currently Unisys ClearPath MCP. Not to be confused with Encom MCP[1], which was defeated by Flynn and Tron in 1982. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP [1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Not to be confused with Encom MCP MCP is the most user hostile OS I've ever seen. It may be less intelligent, but shows the same contempt for users as its fictional counterpart.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Safety first has a price.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      You can't hack an OS you can't use.
      - annoyingnoob 5y ago
        I worked on an HP3000 in the early 90s. It had a software package that changed all of the error messages to resemble IBM360 error messages, just to throw would be attackers off.
        gnu8 5y ago
        Was that package really intended to be a security feature? To me that seems like a low effort way of landing a contract with an over-specific requirement. But security practices used to be way different so that explanation is also plausible.
        annoyingnoob 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
UNIVAC 1108 EXEC-8, now OS-2200. Still in use, 55 years later, with mostly the same API and commands. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_2200
kragen 5y ago
Burroughs MCP was released in 01961 and seems to still be supported. The latest release was 20.0 in May. That's probably the oldest. z/OS was released in 01966. BOS/360 made it out the door earlier, in 01965, thanks to the disastrous delays in z/OS, but it's no longer supported; DOS/360 (z/VSE) also beat z/OS out, is still supported, and is arguably the continuation of BOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/360_and_successors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/360_and_successors Unix wasn't released in 01969. I think it wasn't released until Fifth Edition in 01974, though Thompson and Ritchie described the Fourth Edition in CACM in 01973. Fourth Edition had "over 20" installations, but I think all within AT&T. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Unix
- alexvoda 5y ago
  I find it interesting that you write years using 5 digits with leading zeroes. Can you tell me more about that choice?
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    Y10K problem: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem#:~:text=The%20Year%2010%2C000%20problem%20(also,five%20digits%20for%20a%20year https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem#:~:tex....
    - drewzero1 5y ago
      See also, the Long Now Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
      - YATA0 5y ago
        Do you blame him? He can probably make more than $400k a year grifting with NFTs, doing an order of magnitude less work.
        5y ago
aluminum96 5y ago
This is slightly off topic -- it's about an old supported microarchitecture -- but Linux still supports DEC Alpha, despite no chip with that architecture having been developed since 2004. DEC Alpha has extremely weak memory ordering. [1] In fact, it's the weakest ordering of any arch supported by linux, which includes extra fence instructions to support it. The memory model is crazy weak, but it apparently allows for extra speculative execution parallelism. [1] Awesome Raymond Chen post, totally worth a read: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170817-00/?p=96835 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170817-00/?p=96...
- Klonoar 5y ago
  One question: why? Is this still used en masse somewhere and needs updates? Consider me 100% ignorant.
  - crest 5y ago
    Why support real hardware? Old as Alpha AXP CPUs are they are still orders of magnitude faster than emulating the instruction set. Why care about the instruction set? It a very good regression test for the kernel locking primitives and data structures. Something "boring" like x86 with its TSO memory model will hide bugs.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      Is there something special about Alpha that makes it hundreds of times harder to emulate? X86 Windows XP on my M1 MacBook runs CPU bound workloads faster than my XP machine in 2004 did and that's not even using the extra X86 emulation specific parts of the M1 cores, just bog standard QEMU.
      - skissane 5y ago
        Probably because a lot of effort goes into optimising x86 emulation to be as efficient as possible, whereas I doubt anyone is motivated to make the same investment in DEC Alpha emulation. In practice that will make Alpha emulation slower than x86, quite apart from any technical features of their respective architectures which may impact the efficiency of emulation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
codazoda 5y ago
THEOS might be a contender. I don’t know when it was created, but I ran into a user 15 years ago. They were old then and still providing active support to customers. http://www.theos-software.com/ http://www.theos-software.com/ Edit: Looks like it died in 2014 or 2016 or, at least, that’s the latest update I see. Update: Yup, it’s now listed as suspended. Looks like it was started in 1983.
avar 5y ago
What does "oldest" OS even mean? I haven't used TSOS/BS2000 but its Wikipedia article suggests that while the OS lineage dates back to 1968 that anyone using it currently is using some currently maintained developed version of it. In my mind supporting an old OS means e.g. that someone is still running old terminals that still run actual Windows 95 (emulator or not), DOS etc. It wouldn't be meaningful to say "this runs on an OS from the mid-80s!". Only to find that it's all C# code targeting last year's release of Microsoft Windows (which has its eventual origins in the mid-80s).
- abrax3141 5y ago
  Well, the exact same built-in text editor, called EDT, and he exact same basic command language (like what is "ls" in unix is "fstat" in TSOS) is still nearly exactly the same as I remember it from the 70's. (Of course, there have been improvements and additions, like, say, the internet! .... although, actually, we were on the early internet (arpanet) then too! In fact, my summer job just before college was tinning wires that did the local arpanet interconnect! :-)
eatonphil 5y ago
Along these lines I was curious what the oldest running program is. Found [0]. In use since 1959(ish). [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/06/166822/what-is-the-oldest-computer-program-still-in-use/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/06/166822/what-is-t...
- abrax3141 5y ago
  A (literally!) orthogonal question: What's the most knocked-off program -- that is, has the widest family tree. My off-the-top-of-my-head (OTToMH?) guess would be ELIZA.
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    Not "print 'Hello World!'"?
    - abrax3141 5y ago
      Hmmm. I'm not sure that Hello World actually counts as a program. It's usually just a code snippet. And anyway, it was created (coined?) way after ELIZA.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Xmodem
- geoffeg 5y ago
  Sometimes I think it would have been cool to have gotten into supporting something really obscure like that at an early stage in my career. A near-guaranteed contract renewal as long as the system wasn't replaced. If it was to be replaced, you'd likely have a good amount of warning. You'd be one of a very small handful of people in the world able to support and maintain the system. You could become a deeply knowledgeable expert about the system over dozens of years likely without having to learn a new language, framework or system more than a few times in your career. Of course, the downsides are huge, especially if you limited yourself to that one system. If the contract didn't renew, finding a new job would likely be incredibly difficult. I could see it getting mind-numbingly boring, I guess that might be a plus for some people, but would likely drive me crazy.
walrus01 5y ago
The OS for IBM system/34 and system/36 mainframes is currently virtualized on their z/os POWER systems.
tyingq 5y ago
Possibly TPF, if you consider it's predecessors to be just TPF with different names. https://web.archive.org/web/20041204030934/http://www.blackbeard.com/tpf/tpfhist.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20041204030934/http://www.blackb...

kragen 5y ago

PDP-11 isn't an OS.

egberts1 5y ago
a ginormous scripting OS, PDP/11 is.
p_l 5y ago
What's more, when it comes to computer architectures, even among Digital it's not the oldest nor still supported. Because you can still buy a new PDP-10 (well, PDP-10 compatible, iirc a lot of I/O is different, but it can run TOPS-20 V7 with patches) Of course S/360 has longer continuity of hw/sw combination.
- kragen 5y ago
  You can't buy it from Digital, and TOPS-20 isn't still supported.
- skissane 5y ago
  > Because you can still buy a new PDP-10 (well, PDP-10 compatible, iirc a lot of I/O is different, but it can run TOPS-20 V7 with patches) Who is still selling new PDP-10-compatibles? Systems Concepts? XKL?
  - p_l 5y ago
    XKL is still around and makes PDP-10-on-a-chip for internal use, some people managed to get just the PDP-10 part sold.
    - skissane 5y ago
      XKL is still around indeed, but do they still manufacture the TOAD-2 CPUs? Do they still use it in their current products? The TOAD-2 dates from around 2005 or so, it was designed to be used as a service/management processor in XKL's optical routers, although it could run a patched version of TOPS-20. But do XKL's current products still use it? I can't find any information on whether or not they do, but I'd be surprised if they were still using a 15+ year old part in their latest products.
      - p_l 5y ago
        There apparently was no need to update the design, and so TOAD-2 is still in use. At the very least, last year or so I've seen 2 new TOAD-2 boards ending up outside XKL, with caveat that they do not want to make a business out of selling just the TOAD-2 boards (they do not want to deal with providing support etc.) So various signs on heaven and earth point to still made equipment using TOAD-2s.
        skissane 5y ago
        > At the very least, last year or so I've seen 2 new TOAD-2 boards ending up outside XKL I don't think that proves they still include TOAD-2 in new systems. It is equally compatible with all TOAD-2-based systems going EOL: likely they had some new boards set aside as spare parts for the production systems, once all customers stop using the old TOAD-2-based systems in production, the spare parts are no longer required, and so XKL may have decided to quietly give away (or sell) those spare parts to well-connected 36-bit enthusiasts. Furthermore, there is a good reason to believe they don't use TOAD-2 any more: if you look at the manuals at XKL.com, you'll find recent products are running an operating system called "DXMOS". It appears to be a custom operating system based on *BSD but with a UI inspired by Cisco IOS (so similar in architectural concept to Juniper JunOS, but aiming to be closer in CLI syntax to IOS than JunOS is). The various copyright acknowledgements in their manual (all three of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) support that conclusion (most likely they have picked one of the three as a base, but borrowed some code from the other two as well). It seems rather unlikely a *BSD is running on a 36-bit CPU such as TOAD-2, it seems much more likely it is running on some industry standard 32/64-bit CPU such as x86 (or maybe ARM or POWER or MIPS). Furthermore, the copyright acknowledgements and release notes also show dependence on a number of other software libraries (SSLeay, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Dropbear SSH – not all at the same time, of course, in recent versions they switched from OpenSSH to Dropbear) which seem rather unlikely to have been ported to run on a 36-bit platform.

WorldMaker 5y ago

It's often used to encourage long-term thinking. I most directly associate it with the Long Now Foundation [1], which encourages that format for dates as many of their initiatives strive to consider the Y10K view and beyond. [1] https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/

imoverclocked 5y ago
Since we are adding insignificant digits, I think there aren't enough zeros after the most significant digits; We need to focus on solving todays problems too. For an extreme version of this, 1961 might be written in scientific notation: 0.196100e4 This is also future-proof as we will always have a built-in 0 at the beginning of the number implying that we never get to "1" and there will always be more time to solve the problems we can't even begin to understand that may exist 10k years from now. Sorry for the sarcasm, it was the easiest way to make my point.
- kragen 5y ago
  This is a great idea! I'll try it next week if I remember.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    Next 0.1923e-1, you mean?
    - kragen 5y ago
      Next 0.1917e-1!
- runlevel1 5y ago
  If we're going decimal I'd prefer it be the percent of time elapsed between the Big Bang and heat death of the universe.
  - imoverclocked 5y ago
    The problem is understanding and measuring either of those events with any precision. Even if we somehow could, time also seems to move faster/slower depending on the strength of a gravity field in which it is being measured. I think this makes it really hard to pin down dates near super massive objects... and also means that our linear perspective of time completely breaks down on this scale. eg: where is the reference time located for a few billion years just after the big-bang?
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Really, it's an epoch problem of sorts. If we picked an epoch date with a longer view we might have a better feeling for it as large numbers. For instance we are roughly somewhere between Y12K and Y13K since the estimated start of the Holocene. On the other side, it might feel more scientific to pick a far future epoch date and negative numbers would be a greater reminder of time running out, such this being roughly Y-5e9 until the expected death of our sun. (To be fair to the Long Now, not that they necessarily need fairness, and I'm not a member I just read about them here on HN mostly, adding the initial insignificant zero was intentionally an easy "hack" to keep things recognizable and not get into quagmires like changing the epoch date.)
  - ianburrell 5y ago
    There is the Holocene calendar which adds 10,000 to the year. The current year would be 12022 HE. It has advantages that gets rid of BC/year zero confusion and that all historical dates are positive numbers.
    - kragen 5y ago
      To me this seems like using the Unix time convention but changing the epoch time from midnight UTC to midnight at UTC-12:00, the timezone of Baker Island: it's close enough to produce confusing ambiguity (is "2020" or "02020" intended to mean two years ago, or an estimated date when Jericho's pre-pottery Neolithic A wall fell out of use, suggesting an abandonment of the site?), and it makes it more likely that your software will have untested cases with bugs in them. In the case of the Holocene Calendar the bugs would just be a question of negative dates; in the case of UTC-12:00 it would be a nonnegative epoch time that is nevertheless in 01969 instead of 01970, which will only happen if someone adopts a more westerly timezone like UTC-13:00, pretty much guaranteeing you won't test that case beforehand. (Samoa did something similar in 02011, but it was in the other direction.) Of course, as other people have pointed out, you shouldn't use fixed-width date fields in your software.
- eesmith 5y ago
  RFC 2550 at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550 points out "Floating Point Is No Solution" in §1.2.3.2, and earlier stresses the importance of lexical sorting. The authors propose a time encoding scheme valid up to the year 10 ** 18308. (Hint: look at the publication date.)
  - kragen 5y ago
    Oh dear, I never thought about the year 922,337,203,685,477 problem before.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      It's important if we want our time system to survive until the Degenerate Era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Degenerate_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers... 128 bits isn't even enough to get to the putative half-life of proton decay. There's some truly mind-boggling numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers... "the non-zero probability of producing a new Big Bang in roughly 10^10^10^56 years"(!). These numbers are far beyond https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550#section-2.4.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550#section-2.4.1 , which is only 10^14; about the time star formation ceases. Time for an updated RFC!

compressedgas 5y ago

https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

hayleox 5y ago
Lol, that's completely silly. Who even knows if we'll still be using the same calendar in 8,000 years? Y10K is not worth dealing with until the 100th century.
- kragen 5y ago
  Yes, it is!
  - _jal 5y ago
    So then why not Y100K? Does preparation become pointless sometime after 8,000 years from now, but before 92,000 have elapsed?
    - kragen 5y ago
      Go wild!
      - qot 5y ago
        I'm genuinely curious and haven't found an answer online so I'll ask you: why stop at 10K and not 100K? Also we represent 3-digit years like 770 without problems, so what does this solve? Is the hypothetical problem so bad that solving it is worth the ambiguity between octal numbers and the extra effort for readers to parse 02022 as year?
        kragen 5y ago
        Stop at 100K if you like! Or 1000K! You're a free being!
        jecel 5y ago
        I only know a little about the Long Now Foundation so I could be getting it wrong, but I understood their goal was to help people think about problems beyond the short term. For example, why would anyone plant a tree if they will be long dead before that tree reaches its normal height? Instead of just sitting around discussing vague ideas they thought it would be interesting to design and build something to showcase their ideas, so the "ten thousand year clock" was proposed. It is amazing how many problems you have to solve to build a clock that has even the slightest chance of still be running ten thousand years from now. A side effect of the clock project was that some of the dates involved would have five digit years, so they thought using five digit years for current dates would be a good way of shocking people and exposing them to their ideas.
        kragen 5y ago
        Indeed! But it can be difficult to talk about any kind of new idea on a site full of people who are driven into uncontrollable rages when they see someone deviating from a social convention, however minor.
    - retrocryptid 5y ago
      i think the deal was you always prepend a zero to highlight "the future." it's supposed to remind you of how much more work there is to go to get to the imagined, wonderful future. or at least that's what i always thought.
      - _jal 5y ago
        Ah, OK, gotcha. sprintf for a better tomorrow.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Yes, it is completely silly? And you admit it? Then why do you do it? It's also annoying to read. It costs a half-second to think every time we read a year. That's rather reader-hostile.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Well, it's fun! Also, surprisingly, it flushes out the people who would have supported Turing's ultimately fatal prosecution because OMG he's such a weirdo, before their support is required for anything important. It makes super clear the distinction between who's here to have interesting discussions and who's here to attack other users.
      - avar 5y ago
        "it flushes out the people who would have supported Turing's ultimately fatal prosecution [...]" That's possibly the most hyperbolic thing I've ever read on HN (from someone who looks as though they're just a bit idiosyncratic, and not intentionally trolling) :)
        kragen 5y ago
        It's not hyperbole. I explained the reasoning in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507179. I'm interested to hear what you think.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        I’m not convinced that person isn’t trolling after the comment you replied to
        kragen 5y ago
        Flushing out vicious people who are here to launch personal attacks, by offering them a target for obviously indefensible personal attacks, is indeed trolling, in the sense of "posting something to get a reaction", but it's a kind of trolling that doesn't involve cruelty or dishonesty—unlike the responses it gets! See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506275.
- mod50ack 5y ago
  Even if we do, the year 900 is not written "0900".
  - tomjakubowski 5y ago
    Right, it's written "00900".
    - layer8 5y ago
      Aren’t there infinitely many leading zeros?
      - kragen 5y ago
        That hasn't been the case since a date which I unfortunately do not have enough space to write in this margin.
        bombcar 5y ago
        ::900
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Yep, that would be 01440.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
radford-neal 5y ago
"It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated." Sounds like a good thing to me. It quickly identifies you as someone who prioritizes personal idiosyncrasies over communicating whatever it is you want to communicate - since pretty much every reader will do a double-take on the date (or is it a date?) and be distracted from reading the content. That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful. "Anyone who shows noticeable personal idiosyncrasies in their writing must not have anything useful to say" strikes me as a heuristic of exceedingly little value.
  - radford-neal 5y ago
    It's not just any idiosyncrasy. For example, someone might have the idiosyncrasy that whenever they mention some not-completely-common concept they put in a link to the wikipedia article on it, which I think might get rather annoying. However, I would believe that they thought they were being helpful to the reader, even if they weren't. So in that case, I wouldn't think, "if they don't care about communicating this, why should I bother reading it?"
- kragen 5y ago
  It sounds like you're only posting here in order to launch personal attacks on other people rather than because you have anything to say about old operating systems. The contrast between the amount of relevant and interesting information communicated by your comment, the only one you've posted on this thread, and the comment of mine that you're attacking, is extremely glaring, and it is not in the direction you assert. Please don't do that.
  - coolso 5y ago
    I will say this, sometimes there needs to be a "bad guy" who says what we're all thinking, even if it comes across as mean. Otherwise, how would any of us know what behaviors of ours that other people find irritating, so we can adjust accordingly (since most people don't purposely want to irritate others, usually, and within reason)?
ttyyzz 5y ago
This will come into effect in about 8,000 years. It must be Satire, I laughed anyway.
neilv 5y ago
My "2022" has no arbitrary limit to size. "02022" looks like it's padded to 5 fixed digits, repeating mistakes of the past.
- kazinator 5y ago
  02022 also looks like octal. :) $ echo $(( 02022 + 0 )) 1042
kazinator 5y ago
It's 02022 which has a problem which 2022 doesn't. 2022 says "I'm an abstract integer expressed in decimal: two-thousand and twenty-two", whereas 02022 says: "Likewise, but I'm a five-digit data type requiring a padding zero for some reason that will likely cause a problem when I'm eventually replaced by 99999, and that then needs to be replaced by it successor."
MisterSandman 5y ago
The most hilarious thing is that, on that page, they encourage you to change the date on OSX by hardcoding a prefix 0 to your year. Which means that when we do actually reach the year 9999, you would theoretically have to remember to go in and remove the 0.
- slim 5y ago
  in case you live 7977 years, of course
- hulitu 5y ago
  So you mean Apple has solved the Y2038 problem ?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

mattl 5y ago

Long Now promoting NFTs, lost my respect. https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1436364868131586054 https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1436364868131586054

tomjakubowski 5y ago
Dang, that's too bad. Never follow your heroes on Twitter, I guess.
kragen 5y ago
It's really unfortunate that the top-voted reply to my comment is some kind of partisan struggle applause light that has no relationship whatever to anything I said, to me, or to the topic at hand. (Edit: fortunately no longer the top-voted reply.)
- mattl 5y ago
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Six digit years so much better anyway - in fact I use ::1961 where :: expands to zeros to fill available storage space.
    - mattl 5y ago
      Haha
- sequoia 5y ago
  You chose to make a statement by using a method of formatting dates almost no one recognizes, and is therefor predictably confusing and distracting. If you didn't want to start a conversation about this topic, why did you make this statement in the first place? If you'd your conversations not be derailed by discussion of esoteric date formats, that can achieved very simply: use the typical date formats everyone is familiar with.
  - kragen 5y ago
    You've implicitly glossed mattl's comment as "discussion of esoteric date formats". But it didn't discuss any date formats; instead, it launched into an unprovoked and irrelevant attack on an organization that date formats reminded them of, presumably in hopes that I was somehow associated with them. The problem is that there are bullies posting personal attacks, not that I'm the one being attacked. It's true that when griefers and bullies are around, it's the tall poppies that get cut down. But locating the problem in the poppies rather than the scythe-wielder is obvious nonsense. Someone looking hard enough for an excuse to attack others, Twitter-style, can always find a victim.
    - mattl 5y ago
      I don’t care if you’re associated with them. I do want people to see them for what they’re doing. But you also brought this on by using their propaganda, perhaps in an attempt to promote them or perhaps not.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I'm not responsible for your antisocial behavior. Knock it off.
        mattl 5y ago
        It’s anti-social to call out an organization for their bullshit? Knock off posting 5 digit dates and people won’t call out their bullshit. Or yours.
        kragen 5y ago
        HN isn't here to give you a platform for callouts, particularly irrelevant and content-free callouts. It exists for the sake of curious exploration, not chimpanzee dominance games. Offering me ultimatums in this way because you are unable to control yourself at the sight of a five-digit date is a particularly egregious violation of these norms. Knock it off.
astrange 5y ago
And here I thought they were just a weird coffee shop in Fort Mason.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
Also, when you start claiming to be gods, you better be real sure that there really aren't any other gods. Mythology and literature is full of really bad things that happen to people when they claim to be gods.
debo_ 5y ago
I was entertained to see jwz as the second tweet on that thread; a voice and tone that hasn't changed in 20 years of reading his stuff. It's comforting.
- mattl 5y ago
  He’s the best. I figured this too late.

kragen 5y ago
Sure, if I had bad breath or if I was walking around with my fly open, your comment would apply. But, in this case, the only useful information conveyed is that I'm violating an arbitrary date formatting convention, and that some people become unreasonably angry whenever they see an arbitrary convention being violated. But, obviously enough, I already know I'm violating the date formatting convention, and I could hardly be more aware of those people. My theory is that, like Carmen Ortiz, they like attacking people because it makes them feel powerful, and violations of arbitrary conventions give them the opportunity.
- coolso 5y ago
  I think it's less that you're violating an "arbitrary date formatting convention" and more that you know the formatting convention everyone uses (4 digits), and decide to use your own arbitrary convention that maybe a hundred people in the world use. In fact, you're putting in extra effort just to use this convention that, by the time it's relevant, the earth probably won't even exist anymore. Most people will interpret this sort of thing as extremely pretentious and also assume that you're fishing for "compliments" and trying to look cooler than everyone else. Like an inside joke only you know about, so will someone please ask you about it? This type of behavior is typical in a classroom but becomes a lot less culturally acceptable the older you get.
  - kragen 5y ago
    The convention "everyone" uses doesn't stop being arbitrary just because most people use it. Who cares what most people think? And, yeah, it's true that most human cultures are very conformist, although I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that social groups full of old people are the most conformist. That conformism is why, for example, it took the humans 2000 years from recognizing that light darkens silver chloride until they invented photography, and they're constantly killing each other en masse in warfare, and 50 years after the first Moon landing there are still no cities off Earth. So, lighten up. Play a little. Violate arbitrary conventions. The mind you save could be your own.
    - astrange 5y ago
      The problem with yours is that I can't help but read numbers starting with 0 in octal. How do they write BCE years?
      - kragen 5y ago
        Yeah, I have the same problem with octal. At least I'm young enough that I don't automatically do the conversion in my head. I commonly say things like "Troy fell around 01100 BCE". Except that usually I look up the date so I don't get it wrong like that. I don't know what the Long Now folks do.
        abrax3141 5y ago
        I'm so glad that I'm getting karam for all this polite discourse! :-)
        School-Cotton 5y ago
        How do you express years beyond 99999?
        kragen 5y ago
        Maybe 099999, 0100000, 0100001, ...? Dunno! Ask me again in 97976 years.
    - feoren 5y ago
      > The convention "everyone" uses doesn't stop being arbitrary just because most people use it. Except conventions derive their value from the proportion of people using it. If a convention is stupid for other reasons, it may be worth trying to convert people. But writing numbers without a leading 0 is not stupid; in fact the opposite is. Why not write the current year as 0000000000002022 to preemptively protect against the Y(10^16)k problem? Why not write your age as 027 so that you're prepared when you hit 100? > The mind you save could be your own. You telling people you're liberating their sheeple mind, like literally every conspiracy theorist says, is not helping your case.
      - dihydro 5y ago
        > Except conventions derive their value from the proportion of people using it. False; see US vs ISO date formatting.
      - kragen 5y ago
        If conspiracy theorists are the first thing that comes to mind when someone says someone is acting foolishly and against their own interests, using a snowclone from a 30-year-old Michael Jackson song, rethink your social circles. Get a grip. You're welcome to use the date formats you've proposed if you think they're better.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    > by the time it's relevant, the earth probably won't even exist anymore. On what account is the Earth disappearing in a mere 8000 years?
- enw 5y ago
  It doesn't make me feel powerful, I feel bewildered that you waste other people's time by having to parse an uncommon 5-digit format, rather than using the near-universal convention of only displaying the minimum digits needed. It's superior in every way: minimal, unconstrained, universal.
  - kragen 5y ago
    You know, in base 36, 2022 is "1k6". That's one digit less!

kragen 5y ago
To clarify, you seem to be saying: 1. Your intent was indeed to attack me. 2. Your attack is motivated by my perceived affiliation with a group to which you consider yourself superior; indeed, a group you despise. 3. If this angers me, you consider that a very desirable result. 4. You intend to keep attacking me every time you see me posting a 5-digit year, because you interpret that as a sign of affiliation with the group toward which your antipathy is directed. 5. There is nothing I, or anybody else, can do to change your mind. Am I interpreting you correctly? It's possible there's something I've misunderstood, so please correct me if that is the case. If that is correct, you are expressing an intention to convert HN into an open sewer. I will say again: please immediately desist from this contemptible misconduct.
- mattl 5y ago
  My intention is to make people aware of the bullshit the Long Now foundation is doing. If it makes you mad, so be it. I don’t care about how it makes you feel. You do seem incredibly mad about it that you’re still replying to the thread days later, so I’ll assume you’re annoyed by the fact someone replied to you with something you don’t like, so yes I will continue to reply to anyone using 5 digit years pointing out the Long Now bullshit. If you feel attacked by this, don’t. It’s not about you. You’re not something I need to worry about. We know some common people. I will say this and please take this with jest and not any illwill, but stop fucking replying to this thread.
  - kragen 5y ago
    It sounds like you're saying that I shouldn't "feel attacked by this" because your intent is to attack not just me personally, but everyone like me? And you confirm that your intent is to continue harassing not only me, but anyone else you see using a 5-digit year? It sounds like you're saying I interpreted you correctly on points 2, 4, and 5. I don't understand the contradiction between "I don’t care about how it makes you feel.", and your previous comment, "I love how mad you’re getting". That seems like a direct contradiction to me. Are you saying your previous comment was not an accurate description of your motivations, or that you were previously motivated by angering me, but have now ceased to care how I feel? I have considered your request for me to shut the fuck up ("stop fucking replying"), and I decline it.
    - mattl 5y ago
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