YK2 Bug

[chcarnage]

Hello, for a short essay at my school and also because of personal interest, I'm gathering informations about the Y2K problem. The main focus of this essay is how lesser developed nations dealt with and were affected by Y2K. If you know something interesting about this I'd be glad to read this here, but I'm posting here for a different reason:

I want to write some paragraphs about the technical background of this problem, but because I only use other OSes I lack many details about the Microsoft systems. One key difference apparently is that some Microsoft systems had this bug "at OS level" while *nixes could be affected at application level (it wasn't that difficult to get the information about *nixes and the "2038 bug"). So, which Microsoft OSes were potentially affected by this? What were the countermeasures, were patches available? And how comes the BIOS update a user mentioned in an old topic here in 2004? Every answer would be appreciated.

 

[spherrod]

lots of info here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2k_bug

 

[chcarnage]

That's right but the article lacks specific infos about Windows. All it says is that Windows 95 machines survived Y2K. But I wonder,

[*]Which was the first Y2K-proof Windows version out of the box?
[*]For which versions were patches or solutions available?

[*]And: What exactly made the Y2K Bug a system-level problem? Was there a FAT disk format limitation or where else did this problem appear?

It's this kind of answers I'm still looking for. But thank you for the link anyway!

 

[spherrod]

some info here on the specific Microsoft questions

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/04/05/ms_climbs_down_on_win95/

 

[chcarnage]

Thanks again. I've found a few documentations about Windows and Y2K compliance. However this didn't give me any explanations why Y2K is considered a "system immanent" bug. Maybe this point of view should be changed?

 

[chcarnage]

New question for those with access to a Win95 or 3.x PC: How far can you get the system watch ahead...?

 

[SoulAssassin]

How about you get off your ass and find these answers yourself? Do you just expect to post these questions here and people to go out and find the answers for you? You're sitting on the same internet we are (unless you're on AOL then god help you). When I was in school (not very long ago) we actually had to get up and walk to the library to look through some encyclopedia that would have been from before Y2K (true story: was reseaching Kennedy's assassination in high school and the encyclopedia was written before he was killed) so we would have had to just make up all the crap.

Figure it out yourself.

 

[networkman]

Great info by spherrod, but SoulAssassin's take is rather refreshing!