4 ms·

Wasn't the y2k issue programs that stored numbers as binary coded decimal and only allocated one octet (i.e. two digits) to the date?

• mgerdts 4y ago
  BCD could be one of many problems, but ASCII strings would me more common in systems I dealt with. There were a lot of assumptions about two digit years that maybe made sense sometime in the 70s for code that you didn’t think would survive more than a few years. Also take a look at struct tm. Its tm_year looked like just a 2 digit year and as such people may format it with printf(“19%02d”,…). It is actually the number of years since 1900. In early 2000 I had to fix a broken ftp server that was sending 19100 as the year.
  • mark-r 4y ago
    The only manifestation of Y2K that I ever saw was a receipt with the date 1/2/100.
    • rbanffy 4y ago
      I saw that in websites with Perl-generated dates.