this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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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.
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
It was definitely more than DOS and Windows, it was programs written on all kinds of platforms, from Unix to mainframes and more. That's also a key point, the operating systems were just part of the problem, it was the software found banking, industrial control, and all the things