I think we can defederate that company’s name from our personal vocabulary instances.

  • macniel@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    The Y2K issue wasn’t just a scare though. If the Devs and IT in general didn’t had a strategy to overcome that ridiculous windows issue, things could have go bad. Media did media things and pushed it to a world ending scenario though.

    • Poiar@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t Windows that was the main offender, but instead legacy systems of all kinds made since 1970, where people were not expecting for their programs to run for more than 30 years.

      Surprise! Businesses don’t care whether the code is old, as long as it works - so that data type you store the year in only held two characters, and hard-coded the 19 onto it.

      1999 would be written as 99. 19 + 99 = 1999 = computers were happy.

      2000 would be written as 00. 19 + 00 = 1900 = computers went to shit

      • macniel@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Yeah good explanation. I was too young to had any further knowledge about this issue way back and only saw it manifesting when I had to adjust my windows 95 clock :)

        • NABDad@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Next doom and gloom scenario is 2038, when poorly maintained *nix systems will think it’s Jan 1st, 1970.

          I’ll be pushing 68. Hopefully retired or dead by then.

          … I’ll probably still be working, though…

          • visor841@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Eh, it only being an issue for 32-bit systems will hopefully help. But of course somebody will still be running that in 15 years.

            • Bruncvik@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Lots of financial institutions are still using software programmed with Cobol. My father graduated with a software engineering degree for Cobol in the mid-1970s. My company provides external API for customers who still use green screen terminals. Of course there will be people running 32-bit systems. And I’m sure there will be well-paid jobs for fixing any date overflow on those systems.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It wasn’t Windows, as someone else already explained, but yeah general media spread misinformation as usual when it comes to technology.

      I work in IT and I was there, it was a serious problem that, if not fixed, would have indeed ended up in worldwide disaster, but we knew exactly what it was many years earlier, and exactly how to fix it, and we did so nothing actually happened obviously.

      Media spread fear for nothing, instead of accurately reporting the situation and all the hark work IT people were doing all over the world to make sure everything would be fine.

      • loke@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        In a way, the media hype was not completely bad. It helped ensuring there was budget to fix all those systems.

    • tentphone@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Preparedness paradox - if effective action is taken to mitigate a potential disaster, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused.

      • T0rrent01@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Very relevant in the context of COVID - “we’re not seeing spikes, why are we still locking down and masking up?!” - and a significant driving factor feeding into those radical anti-COVID-protection “no new normal” ideologies.

    • ilex@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I mean in the media sense. There are some actually bad consequences. But the hype on here feels sensationalized.

    • zosu@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      added it to my word filter in connect, yesterday. i was barely able to read your post