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I’m not sure it was because they cared about security - looks more like accounting for 32-bit timestamp rollover would be very disruptive to the huge (legacy) code base and it was a quick fix to work around the problem :)

It was a joke.

I'm pretty sure you're joking. Windows 95 crashed if you sneezed in its general direction, I'm pretty sure it would blue screen due to some edge case well before 49 days of runtime.

No joke.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041207171440/http://support.mi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130731171959/https://sites.goo...

To this day, some programs malfunction after 2^31 milliseconds have passed since bootup, which is the halfway point. Milliseconds since bootup has just become negative, and has not rolled over yet. Just having a negative number of milliseconds is enough to mess with those programs.

More like "innovation" that makes all those machines in factories break every 49 days.