Computer bugs in the year 2000

Berry Kercheval berry at zinfandel.UUCP
Sat Feb 2 03:33:45 AEST 1985


In article <301 at terak.UUCP> doug at terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) writes:
>In the IBM world, the date
>of December 31, 1999 is the highest (latest) date that can be
>specified.  So if you have stuff that you want to keep forever,
>you put a date of 99365 on it.  I leave it to your imagination
>what will happen on 12/31/99 when all of those computers find
>all of those disk files and tapes are to be scratched.


I once heard an apocryphal story to the effect that a Systems Programmer
at Large Unnamed Corp. was debugging something late one night and for
some reason it became necessary to set the system date at 99365.

Guess what happened at midnight?

Guess who is now a plumber?

-- 
Berry Kercheval		Zehntel Inc.	(ihnp4!zehntel!zinfandel!berry)
(415)932-6900



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