The Y2K Bug in BSD 2.11 that Survived 2000
Article excerpt
The PDP-11/70, [Oscar]’s next project " data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/11-70.jpg?w=702" /> A year before the arrival of the brand-new 21st millennium, the Year 2000 Bug was predicted to grind modern society to a halt and ensure that at the dawn of …read more
The PDP-11/70, [Oscar]’s next project
" data-large-file="https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/11-70.jpg?w=702" />
A year before the arrival of the brand-new 21st millennium, the Year 2000 Bug was predicted to grind modern society to a halt and ensure that at the dawn of the year 2001, there’d be nothing left but the smoldering wreck of once great societies. Thanks to the concerted efforts of countless engineers, software developers, and many others, we were left with mostly just silly glitches, with one of these surviving bugs apparently just discovered, as [Van Heusden] reported on an NTPd bug in BSD 2.11.
To be fair, it is a pretty obscure one, as the demonstration involves BSD 2.11 on a PDP-11/70 from 1975, so it’s probably not something that still sees much use outside retrocomputing enthusiast circles. In the blog post, the demonstration involves connecting a specific adapter by Traconex, capable of receiving WWV/WWVH time signals, and setting it up for use by the NTPd prior to running the ntpd -a any -d -d -d -d command.
This can create an ‘offset excessive’ error in the log, which, as the attached patch shows, is due to the use of explicit 20th-century numbering. Although not a bug that’ll really affect anyone, it shows that Y2K bugs didn’t just hide in two-digit year fields, but also lazy shortcuts and assumptions when handling years. This will be useful information while we try to avoid society melting down once more, as the Year 2038 problem is now pretty much right around the corner.