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Y2K
Jan 4, 2022 12:47:47 GMT -5
Post by hushnel on Jan 4, 2022 12:47:47 GMT -5
qbfun, thanks for the in-depth response, I’m not a software guy, I can see and understand the concerns. At the time I’m sure that life support liability issues played a large role in bullet proof code. The last few years of working on this equipment I did start to see some sophisticated software emerging. Particularly in NBICU ventilation. As BMET I kept close contact with the Manufacture’s tech guys. Still do after 8 years of retirement. Their was no concern about the ventilators failing. It was the general fear of upper management that drove the Y2K panic and response. Like I said I proved it would not affect my equipment, and it didn’t.
I was kind of pissed that I had to be at the hospital on maybe the coolest Miami New Years gig of my life. Y3K is pretty far off “o)
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gbfun
Wholenote
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Posts: 463
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Y2K
Jan 5, 2022 3:58:25 GMT -5
Post by gbfun on Jan 5, 2022 3:58:25 GMT -5
Well, yeah ! Y2K new years parties must have been quite the thing. I doubt many nervous software, upper management, market gurus, and military guys had as much fun as they could have... And yeah, the earlier versions of device software were less complicated and that helped a lot I'm sure. But as the computer industry seems enthralled with connecting everything to everything nowadays, the failure points and security issues grow. I fought a losing battle to keep mainframes from being connected to the internet, thus becoming vulnerable to hackers. While my clients didn't get hacked while I was there, that was mostly luck and circumstance I suspect. Predictably, millions and millions, if not billions of losses have accrued to companies hacked...of course. Will ventilators in hospitals get turned off by hackers someday if they use bluetooth or are attached to the network which is attached to the internet ? Wouldn't surprise me ! As for Y3K though, if some bioterrorist organization hasn't returned civilization back to the dark ages by Y3K, the AI bots will have fixed everything up. So Y2K was a unique event in the most primitive age of computer history. I'm quite happy it turned out to be a non-event. I'm starting to wonder if luck and a lower percentage of pot smokers than we have today, could be why. There's gotta be SOME excuse for 2020 !
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Y2K
Jan 5, 2022 11:22:16 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by rickyguitar on Jan 5, 2022 11:22:16 GMT -5
We were living in rural MN for Y2K. One family poured a series of underground concrete vaults to hide food in. Not sure if they were happy or disappointed.
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Y2K
Jan 5, 2022 21:00:29 GMT -5
Post by modbus on Jan 5, 2022 21:00:29 GMT -5
I was an embedded systems engineer back in those days, and fortunately Y2K didn't really affect me at all. Most stuff I worked on didn't have real time clocks, and if they did, the heart of the timekeeping was done with the Unix/C time functions Those functions could handle the Y2K transition with no trouble at all. It had been that way in my field since at least the early-mid 80s, before my time. However, those old Unix/C functions used a signed 32-bit number to keep track of time, and their range was until January 2038. Fortunately, the trend is for 64-bit processors, most systems that use 64 bit processors also us 64 bits to keep track of time, which extended the range way, way, way out. We won't have anything to worry about. There will probably always be 8 bit micros around for low end stuff, and fortunately compiler makers are adding in support for 64 bit numbers there, too, which is good. But be warned, there will be a freak out in the years leading up to 2038, so get ready.
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Y2K
Jan 6, 2022 0:40:31 GMT -5
Post by reverendrob on Jan 6, 2022 0:40:31 GMT -5
I always suspected Y2K was a scam for IT specialists to make a load of money. When the time came I had to oversee the compliance process on behalf of my (government) organisation and didn't change that opinion. It was. I just moved the clocks up on hardware to pre-test, drank my way to profit that night.
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