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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Why didn’t past generations consider these ramifications for future generations? 2038 must have seemed so far away, but now it’s so close I bet even in 2038 and beyond people will still be reading this comment. Maybe they will be cursing us for the tech debt they inherited!

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Because the hardware didn’t support it. We knew in 1999 that the 2038 problem existed, for example, but our choices were a) stop representing dates as seconds since the Unix epoch, and introduce who knows how many bugs in every imaginable piece of software, or b) kick the can down the road until 2038, when presumably everything would support 64-bit integers. b) was the obvious choice then, and it still looks like the right choice to me in hindsight.

IPv6 just popped in to say hi

IPv6 with a 16-bit payload size limit?

64 bit ints (long long) have been used on 32 bit platforms since mid-80s (ILP32LL)

I suppose they figured, quite reasonably, that things written in the 60's would be updated by 2038 and to address this problem was premature optimisation. In the 2000s 64-bit went mainstream which gave us a solid ~30 years to tackle this issue. 32-bit time was introduced in a time where there was a very real argument for it in terms of performance, simplicity, and cost.

I'm not even sure if in hindsight the wrong decision was made.

Why do you assume they didn’t consider it? Memory was too scarce and too expensive to do it.

Unix time is 32 bits, so I guess Unix time was invented a bit later, but around 1970, when Unix was written, RAM cost around $700k/megabyte, or, ballpark, $1/byte (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm)

Even if you had infinite memory, you couldn’t use much of it in your computer. The PDP-7 that Unix started life on topped out at 144kB, the PDP-11 that it was soon ported to at 288kB (64k 36-bit words), and many installs wouldn’t have that.

>Why didn’t past generations consider these ramifications for future generations? 2000 must have seemed so far away, but now it’s so close I bet even in 2000 and beyond people will still be reading this comment. Maybe they will be cursing us for the tech debt they inherited!

~Not enough people in 1985, I guess. They seem more concerned with leap years than anything. https://groups.google.com/g/net.bugs/c/ZGlqGwNaq3I

For someone adult in 2000, 2038 might be retirement age, so they are probably investing in their pension and paying off the mortgage assuming 2038 is coming, but then at work it is like "wont be here when that happens!"

I'll be over 60 in 2038, so my retirement plan is to make a fortune being one of the few UNIX / C graybeards left who can dig all these careless/procrastinating companies out of the Y2038 problem, right before I retire.

Pretty heroic way to exit the industry.

How much code have you written that you expect to still be in use 68 years from now?

Only the really bad code has a hope of lasting that long.

See: climate change, American social security administration, preservation of ancient manuscripts and ruins, etc...

But at least Jeff bezos is putting his fortune into an immortal clock in the desert (I'm being sarcastic but the desert clock is actually real and supposedly a gift to future generations as if measuring time wasn't a problem that stone-age civilizations all over the world were able to solve independently).

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