Y2K38
I’m sure you recall the terrible, horrifying, mind-bogglingly apocalyptic Y2K bug. When the clocks rolled over from year 1999 to 2000, it was predicted that outdated software (built only to handle years in the 1900′s) could crash, leading to global outages of all sorts of computer-based services.
Turns out it wasn’t so bad. There were a few problems of course, but nothing horrific as far as the average Joe was concerned.
It was called the “Y2K” phenomena because “Y2K” is a lot faster than saying “year two thousand,” “second millenium,” or “turn of the century.” It’s the same number of syllables as “two thousand” but is shorter to type by one whole character. And it sounds really catchy. Okay – they had me sold on that.
Turns out, a similar situation will occur about 18 years from now. On Tuesday, January 19th, 2038 at 03:14:07, the internal representation of time for many current computers will experience a rollover much like the 99->00 bug in the Y2K scenario, sending them back to midnight on January 1, 1970.
Now, there are lots of reasons why this is unlikely to be an issue at a large scale. Nevertheless the event has its own Wikipedia page and a whole host of folks with nothing better to do than predict it’s direct contributing effect to the end of the Universe.
Okay – that’s cool. Everyone needs a hobby. But I can’t stand the “historical” appellation this event is being given. Why in the name of HTTP would you perpetuate the use of the term “Y2K38″? It doesn’t make any sense!
- “Y2K38″ is hard to type (and longer than 2038)
- “Why-two-kay-thirty-eight” is a mouthful and a half
I propose we stick with “2038.” Or even simply “38.” There is no circumstance under which we need to pay any homage to the wannabe catastrophe of ten years ago.
Many things in technology are the way they are due to their historical context. Take the QWERTY keyboard layout, for example. Many of these types of things would take loads of time and money to rectify on a large scale, and simply aren’t worth the effort. What we can easily do, however, is actively prevent ourselves from creating more of these bass ackwards situations for the future.
I think that studying our history is extremely important – how are we supposed to understand what is without understanding first what was? But this is simply ludicrous. Please, as a responsible Netizen, do not perpetuate the use of this terribly anachronistic abuse of linguistic freedom.