Humor Music Humour

[Targa]

the y2000 problem made the IT world jittery as the must work time was fixed.

The 'y2000 problem' didn't exist, it was a media hysteria that merely boosted programmers' income while they pretended it did.

 

[skeller047]

The 'y2000 problem' didn't exist, it was a media hysteria that merely boosted programmers' income while they pretended it did.

Speaking as a programmer, who had to deal with this, it DID exist. We all had to make sure that our operating systems were up to date and our code used the proper libraries when dealing with dates. It mostly affected older mainframe systems, which unfortunately were still being used by banks and governments.

I agree it was overblown in the media.

 

[Targa]

Speaking as a programmer, who had to deal with this, it DID exist. We all had to make sure that our operating systems were up to date and our code used the proper libraries when dealing with dates. It mostly affected older mainframe systems, which unfortunately were still being used by banks and governments.

I agree it was overblown in the media.

I was retired by then but back in the late eighties in early nineties had been responsible for checking through a bank's software basically for four digit dates while knowing that was what I had always used.
Then it was ensured any new software was written 'correctly' well in advance of the media hype.

 

[Tenor Viol]

Y2K was real. I worked on core banking systems which had to be tested thoroughly. It was more of an issue for non-mainframe systems in our case. As a trainee mainframe programmer in the early 80s I was told all dates must be of the form YYYYMMDD, or YYYYDDD (Julian Day) as quote "We don't want problems in 1999...". Also, a lot of our dates were held as hexadecimal base displacement counters with X'0000' being 1899-12-31 and X'FFFF' is still some decades away. That meant you could hold a date in 2 bytes although it's more than 20 years since that way of doing dates was replaced completely (it was the last remnant of a system from the early 70s).

Ironically the Y2K issues where I worked were with the more modern mid-sized systems rather than the large mainframe ones.

I agree, that as ever, the media as they always do with tech and science stuff, over dramatise it.

 

[mizmar]

The 'y2000 problem' didn't exist, it was a media hysteria that merely boosted programmers' income while they pretended it did.

The IT and programming industry coped with y2k nicely...
... Online security, not so much.

 

[MikeMorrell]

There's a whole other joke about being decimal or binary.💖

Or even duodecimln

The perennial challenge of domain specific humour is.... it's domain specific. As a sprog assembler programmer in the 80s there were lots of "jokes" around the endless abbreviations and acronyms used in computing, not one of which would be in the slightest bit amusing to anyone else.

@Tenorviool gets my vote for 'most perceptive comment' on the this thread (up until now).

Yeah, back in the 'dinosaur age' of computing I used to be an 'assembler code' programmer too, Thinking in heximal, punching in cards to produce punched tapes, correcting 'parity errors' manually and -when testing - manually adjusting data values and instruction codes via switches on 'the computer'. So I really do laugh at the banter about those long bygone days!
Since those long bygone days, I've had couple of other jobs For example as a manager (and as a consultant or interim manager in a variety of 'business sectors' During past years, I've worked as a volunteer in local social services. Throughout this time, my main 2 hobbies have been music and photography. I'm a (long ago) ex-rugby player and still an avid sports fan.

IMHO, @Tenor Viol's comment about 'domain-specific' humour hits the nail on the head! At least that has been my experience. Wherever I've worked and in whatever hobby I've been involved in, I've always been fascinated by (and enjoyed learning more about) 'domain-specific' humour!

 

[Targa]

@MikeMorrell, did you one of these?
I have a horrible feeling I could still use it in my sleep.

 

[Tenor Viol]

...and my hobbies include music, astronomy, photography. It can get wild talking about observing the Lambda Gruid meteor shower....

 

[greenstripe]

Back to modern day problems...

 

[Colin the Bear]

And the lack of music humour speaks volumes.

 

[mizmar]

And the lack of music humour speaks volumes.

In fairness, the OP derailed the thread.

 

[ESJohn]

@MikeMorrell, did you one of these?
I have a horrible feeling I could still use it in my sleep.

I used IBM 029's and 129's on occasion way back I was just a pup. They were somewhat more modern than below and the 129's were faster than the 029's.

View attachment 28232

 

[Pete Thomas]

As a sprog assembler programmer in the 80s there were lots of "jokes" around the endless abbreviations and acronyms used in computing, not one of which would be in the slightest bit amusing to anyone else.

There is one that is funny IMO re support or bug reports:

PICNIC

(Problem in chair, not in computer)

 

[Woodpad]

For projects with different diciplines I kept an updated ODW lists with acronyms and there meaning. Acronyms could only be used in meetings when there was an updated ODW list for that dicipline.
It kept the meetings short and to the point.

I learned that from two factories that used the same acronym for two different types of quality properties. It took them 4 months to find out.

 

[CliveMA]

@MikeMorrell, did you one of these?
I have a horrible feeling I could still use it in my sleep.
View attachment 28232

I worked for IBM in the late '70s. I believe I installed the last punched card IBM mainframe Operating System (OS/VS1) ever used in Australia. The OS loaded from punched cards onto what would now be considered very slow and tiny disks. It was at an insurance company in Sydney.

 

[Ghr9204]

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[CliveMA]

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[Colin the Bear]

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[Dibbs]

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[Targa]

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