muckles:
Winseer:
muckles:
Winseer:
Has everyone forgotten the 20th century?It was this period of time you see, that only came to an end a generation ago… That’s Pre-year 2000, when we got told another batch of bull scare stories regarding the Y2K bug that was going to blow up all our computers, and melt our brains…
Yes there were many scare stories about Y2k from an uninformed media looking for a sensational headline, but there was also a lot of work done by IT departments across the World to avoid the potential consequences of the Y2K issue, (it wasn’t a bug, just a legacy from the early days of programming)
As a programmer from the 80’s before I got a C+E licence - I can tell you that the so-called “early days of programming” issue was dealt with in FULL when computers went first from 8 bit to 16 bit by the end of the 80’s,
The Y2K issue didn’t worry the computer people of the 80’s and 90’s then -
That sounds like one of those 60’s quotes when “if you remembered it, you can’t have been there”. Financial Firms from the 80’s… I was installing pootah screens at places like Kleinwort Benson at the time, sticking wiring down lift shafts, and rummaging around under mezzenine floors trying not to trip over the “chucked in any old how” BT cables… Month 255 was a payroll problem for 8 bit machines. Once the 16 bit machines came in during the late 80’s, only those machines branded “New” upto the year 1989 - would have been at risk of “Y2K” clock-over, where there is no month zero, computer cannot divide by zero without casuing a drop-out error… 8 bit machines can only register a maximum number of 255 (Hex &FF) before “clocking over to zero”. 16 bit machines need to get to 65535 before clocking over (Hex &FFFF) 32 bit machines are somewhere in the order of 4 billion addresses, and thus eliminate any “clockover” issues for good. If your payroll gets a month number, then for 255 to be around the turn of the century, we’re talking about a machine produced brand new about the time of the winter of discontent. How many of those machines do you think were left, even going into the 90’s?
So how come when I was working in IT in the late 90’s for a major financial services company, were they spending so much time and money checking the whole system was Y2K compliant, especially their legacy programs written in the 70’s?
My soldering was crap however, and I eventually got the push after having a stand up argument with a Chief Trader who didn’t like me moaning back at him, after he pointed out he was on 10 times what I was on for working a particular sunday afternoon… 