Subj : Re: Operating Systems
To   : claw
From : tenser
Date : Sat Apr 13 2024 02:39:12

On 11 Apr 2024 at 11:24p, claw pondered and said...
 
 cl> On 11 Apr 2024, Digital Man said the following...
 cl>  DM> The problem is in the softare, not "the system". The system can be
 cl>  DM> 64-bit and still have plenty of 32-bit time_t use lurking in its
 cl>  DM> software. Y2K38 is definitely going to blow some shit up (figurativel
 cl>  DM> if not literally). -- 
 cl> 
 cl> Well I will have to read more about it.  If its software then Why isn't
 cl> this fixed already.  Guess I will have to ready about it to know why its
 cl> not simple.

For the simple reason that software rots if left unattended
for a long time.  Very few programs require _no_ maintenance
as the world around them evolves.

There's a lot of software out there, written 20 or 30 years
ago, that made a lot of assumptions about the state of the
world; there were a lot of programmers who thought to
themselves in 1991, "Gee, the year 2038 is a long time from
now..." and took shortcuts.  In some cases, the source code
has been lost, or orphaned, or the programmer has even died;
consider Spitfire BBS, as an example: Mike Woltz passed away
a year or so ago.  It's unlikely that anyone will ever see
the Spitfire source code.  Or consider all of those unattended
little boxes with a microprocessor in them running some
ancient unpatched version of an operating system, that no
one bothers to update because either they can't, or no one
feels the need to do so.

The same thing happened with Y2K, and occasionally we _still_
kick up a Y2K bug turning over some software rock.

It's not that we _can't_ fix it in software, it's that it's
actually a really big job, and no one has done the work yet.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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