dating xkcd

Why do we still have to deal with stupidities like the unix 2038 problem?

So I was reading an XKCD comic and came across the Unix 2038 problem and was curious as to why we STILL store time information like that. It seems most appropriate to define dates as abstract objects which are ultimately a collection of integers. Sure, in theory we would still eventually come across a problem like this but not for a very very long time if we represented a datetime with year, month, day, hour, minute, second, milisecond, (possibly microsecond if need be). But why are we still storing dates in ways similar to the y2k problem, (granted it wasn’t really a big deal) but didn’t we learn our lesson?

Just ask an economist- it’s because of scarcity. Memory does have to be stored in a physical form and we can only cram so many bytes into a set amount of space. Way back when, memory was really expensive so people took shortcuts to conserve space. Even now, we don’t waste space unnecessarily. Also, we still use a lot of legacy software. The core of Windows is still the code written in the 80s. The core of the Unix systems (including Mac OS X) was written in the 70s.

However, like the comic states, this really isn’t going to be a problem. As time has gone on, we have moved from computers using 8-bit numbers to 16-bit numbers to 32-bit numbers and now 64-bit numbers. It’s actually faster for the computer to work with whatever the native architecture supports than the smaller number. For a 32-bit number, we would run out of milliseconds in 2038. Even now, most recent computers are capable of running a 64-bit operating system, which stores the time as a 64-bit long. This means we won’t run out of room until several thousand years from now. By then, we’ll have moved well past 128-bit computers so we should never actually run into a problem unless someone is trying to use a 40 year old computer.

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