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[-] magnetosphere@fedia.io 29 points 5 months ago

I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.

[-] Thrashy@lemmy.world 35 points 5 months ago

Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.

At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn't support 4-digit years... But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn't process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators' terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 19 points 5 months ago

That "outdated" programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it's like a cockroach.

[-] magnetosphere@fedia.io 5 points 5 months ago

Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.

this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
529 points (98.5% liked)

Nostalgia

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nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia

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