There is a certain amount of snark embedded in this post, but its not a bad idea at all - I'll be in much the same boat at that time - perhaps I can borrow the same idea...
With suitable groundwork, there will be a willing and wealthy market looking for people to assuage their fears - a service I see myself as happy to provide. Much as it was in the "Millennium bug" area, a lot of the effort in getting the business is PR spadework, but I've got 15-20 years of prep time to position myself suitably. I also hope to provide a slightly more useful service than many Millennium consultancies did at the time.
select unix_timestamp('2038-01-19') returns 2147472000
select unix_timestamp('2038-01-20') returns 0And, even if they happen to be safe, they do tend to pay well just for an audit to confirm that.
If this class of business is not seeing a problem this minute, it isn't a bug. And it won't be a serious-enough bug to spend money on until whatever workarounds they can think of start having negative effects on income.
Sources: experience with Y2K remediation, experience with small business consulting & software development, experience with humans.
So true. That said, thinking 38 years into the future is usually not sensible for most businesses, because it's very possible that they're bankrupt before then. Thinking 21 years into the future also offers poor ROI for the same reason.
Strikes me that big businesses would have thought "will we need to do this again in a few years" and acted appropriately and that there should be a trickle down effect as large corps demand future proofing in IT products.
Yes negligence, ignorance, lack of foresight, corner cutting, and other human traits feed in to that.
If you know anything about programmers, you know they found that error at some point during development, thought about how other people dealt with that, remembered that windows used to treat >30 as 1900s and <30 as 2000s and did the same. So probably the people in this thread planning their retirement solving this will have to figure out which random unix timestamp number is treated as pre 2038 and which one is after. And then they will have to undo all the last-minute spaghetti code tying it up on the original program.
The problem with mainframes is that they can't be trivially upgraded or migrated to 64-bit like modern OS's on x86 hardware can be. Vendor lock-in, retirement of OS, bare to the metal coding, etc caused this. If these mainframes were running a modern OS, it would have been trivial to upgrade them to a 64-bit version and make whatever small changes are needed to date storing in the old 32-bit apps. You won't need a wizened COBOL guy for this. A first year CS student would be able to look at C or C++ code and figure this out. Modern languages are far more verbose and OO programming makes this stuff far easier to work with.
Comparing mainframes to unix systems really doesn't make sense. Its two entirely different designs. Not to mention, the idea of running a 32-bit OS today is odd, let alone 20+ years from now, especially with everything being cloudified. You'd be hard pressed to even find a 32-bit linux system in 20+ years, let alone be asked to work on one. That's like being asked to setup 1000 Windows 98 workstations today.
These installations exist, and (outside of tech startupland) isn't even that strange, although he is probably pushing things. The owner of that business is proud of how long he's made his IT investment last; his main concern is that dirt-cheap second-hand replacements that can run 98 are apparently getting harder to find.
I have no idea why you think running 32-bit today is "odd." 32-bit desktops and small servers are still perfectly usable today. 32-bit microcontrollers are going to be around for a very long time (just look at how prevalent the 8051 remains), and a lot of them are going to be running Linux. It also makes a lot of sense to run 32-bit x86 guests on AMD64 hypervisors - your pointers are half the size so you can get a lot more use out of 4GiB of memory.
(disclaimer: IBMer, but not a mainframe person)
Installation of win98 is so quick, so easy, compared to XP.
But websites don't render so well in the win98 version of IE. I don't think it knows about CSS.
Now that I think about it, I probably had an Ericsson T28 in 2000 and it did kinda suck.