Warning: Y2K38 Problem Hitting Software World

For all those who are into the IT industry (and those who are not into it too) the Y2K problem would surely ring a bell. There was a situation wherein all computers would be turning their dates and records to zeros during the start of this millennium on the first of January 2000. So,in order to resolve that, large number of mainframe experts were sent to the US and things got settled on time.

However, that has led to another eventuality that might strike and this time the target date is likely to be the month of January and the year is 2038. In common words, once the said date arrives all the computers will reschedule their dates to the year 1901 and what are the consequences of that need not be explained once again. Now, what is causing this situation to arise is the point.

Apparently, when the programs were written to curb the Y2K issue they were done in the C programming language and this uses a standard 4 byte format due to which the beginning of time is recorded as January 1, 1970 at 12:00:00 am and the value for this would be 0.

Also, the signed 4-byte integer has a value of 2,147,483,647 and when the date January 19, 2038 comes it is equivalent to a value of 2,147,483,647 which means that the system will roll onto the negative value. So anyone whose systems are working on the C Programs that use the standard time library will begin to have problems with the date calculations.

While experts are saying that this cannot be deemed as a major threat given the new kind of programs that have emerged, there are those experienced few who cannot guarantee how much of this hypothesis will really work. While that seems to be the challenge for the IT guys to come up with an appropriate solution, the problem would be for the Non IT guys who have made computers their integral part since they would not understand head to tail of the whole algorithm.

All in all, practically speaking there is still a lot of time and given the pace at which the technology is changing, one can be sure that something will surely come up to make things easier but then the evolution of such crises needs to be curbed at any cost since that would mean a lot of laborious work and clean up missions for many employees.