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Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't intended to be sarcastic. I suspect there will be a lot of businesses (especially finance) interested in verifying that the "ancient" Linux system they setup to replace their mainframe 25 years "ago" is safe. I lived through the Year 2000, and watched the same thing happen there.

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.

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Databases too. MySQL has a 2038 bug in their UNIX_TIMESTAMP function.

  select unix_timestamp('2038-01-19') returns 2147472000
  select unix_timestamp('2038-01-20') returns 0

Surely these sorts of errors in major systems are already being/have already been addressed - for healthcare for example a search for which members of a GP's practice are going to be pensioners in 2040 is going to error badly? Strikes me that the time to address them was shortly after the millennium bug.

That's not been my experience. A lot of companies don't address needs that are farther in the future, because there are nearer term needs and a fixed budget. Also, legacy systems that haven't been patched or updated in decades aren't that uncommon.

And, even if they happen to be safe, they do tend to pay well just for an audit to confirm that.

Financial systems that deal with bonds already have to deal with maturity dates on 30-year bonds that are past 2038.

Those type of systems use various date representations instead of datetime/timestamp fields, they should be mostly immune. Well, until 2038 arrives and some of these dates start being compared with the current datetime.

If you were around for the millennium bug, then surely you remember how many people waited until about October, '99 to start looking for problems. If you think those people went looking for another problem 38 years away to fix...

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.

>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.

I was thinking large companies, banks etc.. I'm not in IT/programming but remember (despite being young) that 2 other calendar related 'bugs' were mentioned at the time. IIRC we've had one and the epoch bug is the second.

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.

Generally, the bigger and older the company is, the more unmaintained cruft you have. Banks would be one of the worst I imagine.

> Surely these sorts of errors in major systems are already being/have already been addressed [...] search for which members of a GP's practice are going to be pensioners in 2040

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.

Aren't you worried that by then someone will develop and train a DNN to do that?

Woah, you were alive in the year 2000? Tell us what that was like, grandpa!

Our phones sucked and we had to watch television with commercials you couldn't skip.

I don't know what phone you had in 2000, but I had a Nokia 2100 in 1996 and it was the best phone ever made.

Now that I think about it, I probably had an Ericsson T28 in 2000 and it did kinda suck.

>verifying that the "ancient" Linux system they setup to replace their mainframe 25 years "ago" is safe.

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.

Be careful about your definition of absurd. Somewhere, right now, some poor bastard is building an NT 3.51 workstation for some stupid reason. I'll bet you $0.05 that some future poor bastard will be building NT4 or 2000 devices in 2038. :)

Well, at least NT has no problem with 2038 ;-)

I built an NT3.5 VM in 2012 to run some ancient book binding publishing junk that relied on an ancient version of access... might still be in production, no idea.

It isn't 1000 seats, but I know of a Win98/NT4 shop. It is an isolated network supporting mostly phone sales and pick-and-pack, runs some ancient copy of MAS90 and some home-grown software.

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.

Pretty much everything in your post is wrong. IBM mainframes are heavily virtualized and have very good support for moving to larger address spaces. VM and MVS moved from 24-bit to 31-bit to 64-bit address spaces. You can run the old 24-bit applications and upgrade them as needed. Even assembly programs - the old assemblers and instructions are supported on newer hardware. System i (System/38-AS/400) was built around a 128-bit virtual address space from the start. There is much more support for fixing old software on mainframes than there is for proprietary 1980s-era PC and Unix applications.

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.

Also note that IBM mainframes can run 64-bit Linux just fine. Indeed, IBM's been marketing its LinuxONE mainframe line as a z series machine that doesn't run z/OS at all.

(disclaimer: IBMer, but not a mainframe person)

We're talking Mainframe system designs and code from the 70s and 80s. No they aren't running 64-bit linux. I think you guys need to re-read my post. The legacy systems on Y2K had none of these features.

I just set up a Windows 98 system last week!

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.

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