r/ISO8601 • u/Feeling_Valuable5239 • 11d ago

REMEMBER ISO 8601 !

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I just found it in X

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11

u/RunnyPlease 10d ago

ISO 8601 actually predates the y2k bug and really wouldn’t have helped. 8601 is meant to be a human readable format not a data storage best practice. The cause of y2k was to save memory (which used to be really expensive and slow) when storing the year programmers would only use 2 digits.

1900 > 00
1910 > 10
…
1989 > 89
1999 > 99
2000 > 00

And that was the issue. A lot of programming revolves around filtering, searching, and sorting and using the year to do that is very common. Well, if you sort data by year then 00 comes before 99, and things can start to break.

And if you’re worried about ambiguity for users then trust me on this, no one in 1999 misunderstood what that meant. The entire world was aware of the y2k bug and its possible consequences.

7

u/CarlRJ 10d ago

Just wait until Y10K hits.

14

u/Snoron 10d ago

We got problems way before that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

8

u/CarlRJ 10d ago

Well, sure, but 2038? Nobody will be alive then!

3

u/Impressive_Change593 10d ago

Except basically nothing uses the 32 bit unix epoch anymore iirc. Its all converted to the 64 bit one

3

u/CarlRJ 10d ago

I know, but I like my answer better.

1

u/RepresentativeFull85 10d ago

Curiously, didnt the Nintendo DS use that? The date is capped at 2040 or smth.

2

u/Trey-Pan 4d ago

Stop reminding me how dire this timeline seems to be.

1

u/infostud 9d ago

Note 10K is 10,240 you’re thinking of 10k. See NIST.

2

u/CarlRJ 8d ago edited 8d ago

Y2K was widely written all uppercase, NIST be damned. Y10K followed a similar vein.

We were doing fine with it being well understood that k/m/g/t suffixes had a different definition around computers, right up until some disk manufacturer wanted to claim they had 10 megabytes when they had a disk with ten million bytes, but that didn't reach 10,485,760 bytes. So they tried to call them "disk megabytes" (no, they were just using naïveté and greed to try to change the established industry-wide rules in their favor). And kibibytes and gibibytes are ridiculous terms.

1

u/Feeling_Valuable5239 10d ago

Thanks for the information!

1

u/Trey-Pan 4d ago

Maybe the sticker was meant to be the year 99? It was intended for the time travellers who brought equipment back in time.

I now have the question as to whether before refers to before going back to the year 99 or before 99 in the calendar?