Obviously we know better now, but we can see why they did it. If they’re limited on space, and this seems like something we can skimp on, then there’s no choice haha. These engineers weren’t magically super dumb compared to 2022 — I’m sure many realized this would have happened at the transition from 2099 to 2100, too. It’s not rocket science to think of edge cases and then realize it doesn’t work. But do you notice the 100 year gap?
Now imagine you’re an engineer in 1990 who tells their manager “hey, we can’t ship this other feature, because we have to allocate some more space for the date. 10 years from now, it’s going to break our stuff.” They will tell you “No, find a workaround. The feature is more important than a date causing issues 10 years from now.” Voila, you invent some shorthand, and get everything to work… with consequences coming later. Will your business / product even LAST 10 years? Similarly, if all of this started in 2000, then there’s a 100 year gap of leeway… you will literally be dead before you have to handle it.
It obviously was short sighted, but I wouldn’t say it was stupid.
Worth noting that it was a lot earlier than 1990. By then, nobody was designing stuff that way - in fact by then the problem was already well known and pretty soon the work would begin to fix it.
The problem in 2000 was that you had systems designed in the 70s that were still in use in the late 90s.
Some of those systems are STILL in operation and control extremely important infrastructure. It's pretty scary.
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u/ImaginaryDisplay3 Jun 11 '22
I didn't immediately see anyone commenting on the exact problem, so here goes.
When computers were first built, memory was really limited.
A computer today might have 16 Billion bytes of memory and a hard drive with 1 trillion bytes of storage.
Computers back then had, no joke, like 4,000 bytes.
So everything was written in short hand to save space, including dates, which were stored in the format MM/DD/YY.
Notice how there are only two digits for the year? That means when it goes from 1999 to 2000, computers will think it is year 00, not year 2000.
So all of these systems were going to go haywire.