Re: [TUHS] The 2038 bug...

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 09:09:33AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: Emulation is the key problem. I still have a production server running on a Linode VM which was installed using Debian 6.0 using i386 binaries sometime in 2011. I kept it on 32-bits because it's more RAM efficient, and it would have been a pain to reconfigure all of its services if I were to reinstall it to use a 64-bit OS --- and Debian has had silky-smooth upgrades from Debian 6.0 all the way up to Debian 10.0 in 2019. There is some discussion of dropping i386 support in Debian, which may force the issue, but up until now, it's just been easier for me to do major updates every 2-3 years to the latest Debian stable, and rely on security updates in between major updates. Twenty years ago, one of larger customers for the company I was working for at the time (VA Linux Systems) was one of the new electronic stock exchanges, and they were using Linux boxes with PDP-11 emulators because their stock trading software was written in Macro-11 and running on RSTS/E. They had tried three times to rewrite it so it could run on something more modern, but each time, the rewrite had ended in failure. So they simply sharded the problem, so one x86 server running RSTS/E in emulation would service stocks symbols AAAA--ADZZ, and the next would service stocks AEAA--AFZZ, and so on. Given that this was back in 1999, I assume they had solved the Y2K problem one way or another, but even if they hadn't yet, I suspect it would have been easier for them to fix the problem by asking their dedicated Macro-11 Software Engineering team to fix it, than to ask that same team to help the other team put themselves out of a job (which for some reason, never seemed to happen successfully...) - Ted