One of the comments:

> Us, ten years after generating the certificate: "Who could have possibly foreseen that a computer science department would still be here ten years later."

This was why there was a Y2K bug. Most of that code was written in the 80s, during the Reagan era. Nobody expected civilization to make it to the year 2000.

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bombcar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

No, people thought that storing a year as two digits was fine because computers were advancing so fast that it was unlikely they'd still be used in the year 2000 - or if they were it was someone else's problem.

And they were mostly right! Not many 80s machines were still being used in 1999, but lots of software that had roots to then was being used. Data formats and such have a tendency to stick around.

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naikrovek 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Software has incredible inertia compared to hardware.

It is effectively trivial to buy millions of dollars of hardware to upgrade your stuff when compared with paying for existing software to be rewritten for a new platform.

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oasisaimlessly 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a very SWE-centric perspective. The very names of software/hardwsre would imply the exact opposite.

	▲	marcosdumay 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Has the last industrial hardware you've seen updated to use protected memory like most controllers have been able to for a few decades? Or better, its drivers run in what Windows version?