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    From
    SubjectRe: time_t size: The year 2038 bug?
    Date
    Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de> writes:

    > On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 05:13:00PM -0600, Bill Wendling wrote:
    >
    > > My main point was that 38 years is a LONG TIME in the computer industry.
    > > Are you still using Wordperfect 5.1 on a 386 DOS machine at 40 MHz? It
    > > requires much less energy than the Windows boxen running at 200+MHz and
    > > it has the added feature that secretaries really liked it and the Windows
    > > version of the same product sucked (from what I understand). That was 10
    > > years ago...
    >
    > But your are completely missing the point! What chip is in your cell phone?
    > Most likely an ARM or Mips. 32bits. What chip is used in Fords electronic
    > motor control? PPC4xx. 32bits. What chip is used in the german d-box (DVB
    > settop box)? M68323 with the next generation going for PPC4xx. Still
    > 32bits.

    it matters not that the MIPS R3K is 32-bits or not. consider:

    1) the lowly 8-bit motorola 6502 is capable of 64 bit math by chaining
    eight 8-bit operations.

    2) even when CPUs are 64-bit, e.g., dec/compaq-alpha, time_t is still
    often 32-bits.

    people do and will continue to do stuff like

    time_t tx;
    ...
    time(&tx);
    write(tx,sizeof(time_t),fd);

    and this gets embedded into fileformats like tar and various databases
    making it very hard to change.

    just like y2k, it's not a question of cpu, but of data and file formats.

    since the binary time format is so pervasive, i predict it will be
    harder to fix than the y2k problem. in y2k it was mostly I/O format
    strings and BCD dates in COBOL datastructures. 2038 will be all of
    unix.

    --
    J o h a n K u l l s t a m
    [kullstam@ne.mediaone.net]
    Don't Fear the Penguin!

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