Y2K and immortal executables

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu Oct 22 09:55:48 1998

At 06:58 PM 10/21/98 -0400, Allison J Parent wrote:
>< I'm still skeptical.
>
>Ok, howabout a Brigeport milling machine with the PDP-8E it was purchased
>with in 1975, still running the same code.

Sure, I can imagine that. But I can't imagine it will stop working
on January 1, 2000, or that the clock couldn't be set back to 1975
without affecting the milling.

>code from the 50s would likely be fortran or Cobol and yes it would be
>portable enough to go from one machine to the next with only a compile
>(no edits). Code from the late 60s era machine could still be running
>oth either native hardware or later machines that had to support old
>code.

Wait a minute - we history-buffs can certainly place dates for the
creation of COBOL and FORTRAN, as well as the period in which those
languages became popular for business. What's a reasonable period
for the start of popularization of FORTRAN and COBOL?

If the source code has existed in some form since the late 50s or
early 60s, no programmer since its creation has tinkered with it?
I can imagine a slightly more plausible situation in which the source
was written in 1961, recompiled and tweaked throughout the Sixties,
and somehow the source was lost after recompilation in the Seventies
so only the executable remains, and that it's been running in some
kind of emulation box since then - but again, I find it hard to
believe that almost all date-dependent programs haven't had some
*other* reason to be changed in all those intervening years, requiring
their replacement or re-creation (in new source code) since then.

It's not that I'm denying Y2K - it's that I think it's overblown,
especially when it comes to antique computers.

- John
Received on Thu Oct 22 1998 - 09:55:48 BST