re: #226 Unabogie

As others have pointed out, Y2K was indeed a huge problem. It didn’t turn out to be a catastrophe because billions were spent hiring programmers to update old software and hardware.

Company I worked for was taking it into account in 1993. New application development used 4-digit years or simply stored them as date fields*. Some applications were earmarked to be scrapped by 1998 at the latest. And a project was in planning by 1996 and started implementation in 1997 to do conversion work on the systems that had to be modified to handle Y2K by one method or another.

* - Essentially stored as an offset in milliseconds from a fixed date setting an epoch time. I’ve seen a “zero time” of both 1970 and 1858 in systems. This became a lot more common to use in the 1980s and 1990s as the great computer memory crunch eased and programmers were no longer trying to squeeze numeric information in as little memory space as possible. (Yes packed decimal, I remember you.)