2 ms·
No, people thought that storing a year as two digits was fine because computers were advancing so fast that it was unlikely they'd still be used in the year 200
by bombcar 7mo ago
No, people thought that storing a year as two digits was fine because computers were advancing so fast that it was unlikely they'd still be used in the year 2000 - or if they were it was someone else's problem.
And they were mostly right! Not many 80s machines were still being used in 1999, but lots of software that had roots to then was being used. Data formats and such have a tendency to stick around.
- naikrovek 7mo agoSoftware has incredible inertia compared to hardware. It is effectively trivial to buy millions of dollars of hardware to upgrade your stuff when compared with paying for existing software to be rewritten for a new platform.
- oasisaimlessly 7mo agoThis is a very SWE-centric perspective. The very names of software/hardwsre would imply the exact opposite.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoHas the last industrial hardware you've seen updated to use protected memory like most controllers have been able to for a few decades? Or better, its drivers run in what Windows version?
- jamesfinlayson 7mo agoFunnily enough I worked at a company with a codebase written in the 1980s - no idea what it originally ran on but someone decided in the mid 2000s to update it to run on modern hardware. Unfortunately they chose Itanium... so 20 years later they're paying lots of money for Itanium hardware.