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 4 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 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	marcosdumay an hour 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?