Was FORTRAN buggy 4345

in the last half of the last century (as computerized dataprocessing proliferated), there were still quite a few people that had been born before 1900.

reference to a old "y2k" like problems somebody posted from the early 80s

repeat of somebody's posting from 1984:

1.In 1968 plus 1, Continental Airlines was the first (insisted on being the first) customer to install PARS. Rushed things a bit, or so I hear. On February 29, 1972, ALL of the PARS systems cancelled certain reservations automatically, but unintentionally. There were (and still are) creatures called "coverage programmers" who deal with such situations.

2.A bit of "cute" code I saw once operated on a year by loading a byte of packed data into a register (using INSERT CHAR), then used LA R,1(R) to bump the year. Got into a bit of trouble when the year 196A followed 1968 plus 1. I guess the problem is not everyone is aware of the odd math in calendars. People even set up new religions when they discover new calendars (sometimes).

3.We have an interesting calendar problem in Houston. The Shuttle Orbiter carries a box called an MTU (Master Timing Unit). The MTU gives yyyyddd for the date. That's ok, but it runs out to ddd=400 before it rolls over. Mainly to keep the ongoing orbit calculations smooth. Our simulator (hardware part) handles a date out to ddd=999. Our simulator (software part) handles a date out to ddd=399. What we need to do, I guess, is not ever have any 5-week long missions that start on New Year's Eve. I wrote a requirements change once to try to straighten this out, but chickened out when I started getting odd looks and snickers (and enormous cost estimates).

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this was computer conferencing supported with TOOSLRUN technology mentioned in recent post