
Macintosh Y2020 - zdw
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2020/4/5_Macintosh_Y2020.html
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microtherion
The reason why an epoch in the past was picked, I think, is that the designers
wanted date stamps to represent all dates in common use, e.g. birth dates (of
course, that did not cover >80-year-olds in 1984).

Pretty sure that the reason to pick 1904 in particular was to simplify leap
year calculation to !(year & 3). 1900 didn't have a leap day, and by picking
1904, all leap years within the range of the time stamp had one.

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brianpan
What a delightfully geeky post!

After explaining how this one affects computers over 2 decades old, that this
doesn't affect the system but _only_ setting of the clock, and how a utility
already provides a workaround, I had a moment of giddiness when I read that
we're going to walk through patching _every_ version of the 20-40 year old OS.

Why? Because we can!

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cschmidt
Does anyone else remember the weirdness with dates in Excel files? On Windows,
they used 1900 as the epoch, and on the mac they used 1904 (like the Mac
itself), so if you got a spreadsheet from someone on a windows machine, dates
would sometimes shift by 4 years.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/troubleshoot/excel/1...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/troubleshoot/excel/1900-and-1904-date-system)

I haven't thought of that in years.

~~~
gresrun
Excel also has a deliberate bug where it thinks 1900 is a leap year because
they wanted compatibility with Lotus 123, where the bug was actually a bug!
[0]

[0] [https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI?t=325](https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI?t=325)

~~~
chrisfinazzo
All because Joel Spolsky told Bill Gates it was there.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
rev...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)

Reading Joel’s post again, I suspect Bill’s style of review (having read the
spec, made notes, and having a “F” counter for screwups) lends credence to the
idea that he would have done exactly as Joel did and sought out Fries or some
other senior Excel person if he didn’t get a satisfactory answer.

As Joel laments, you can’t bullshit a programmer, and Gates was (underneath it
all) a programmer.

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smoyer
I've got a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet (the last machine that couldn't be updated
to OS X) that still runs a couple hours off its battery and looks very much
like the screenshots shown in this article. I've also got the original boxed
game of Myst which is the main reason I kept it.

~~~
ccamrobertson
I've done far too much research into this lately, but I believe that
Wallstreet was officially supported by OS X (although only up to 10.2).

The PowerBook G3 Kanga, however, cannot without some hacking; it's a
frankenstein model which was only available for about four months. It
shoehorned a super fast (at the time) 250mhz G3 CPU into the old 3400c form
factor and looks like it's from another era in comparison to the sleek
Wallstreet.

~~~
smoyer
I'll have to get it out (might end up wasting some time on Myst tonight!) ...
I'm remembering that some Wallstreets had Ethernet ports and others didn't and
that those without couldn't be updated. Of course, that machine wasn't
terribly speedy with OS 9 on it so I'm not sure it's worth the upgrade. Still,
it was an amazing piece of hardware which still runs almost 25 years later.

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seiferteric
> This is why there was no alarm in January 2020 among the small but dedicated
> group of Old Macintosh enthusiasts.

> Nobody I know wants to set the computer’s clock to 1920.

What about the even smaller and more dedicated group of old Macintosh using
time traveling enthusiasts?

~~~
rzzzt
Do electrolytic capacitors rejuvenate when travelling backwards in time?

~~~
drewzero1
You first have to replace all of the electrolytic caps with the flux type to
make the computer time travel.

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mwcampbell
About the housekeeping overhead in PowerPC machine code generated by the C
compiler:

> This, combined with the (correct) practice of modularizing everything into
> small subroutines that don't individually do much, produces very long
> programs dominated by instructions that don't do anything we care about.

I wonder how much of this was due to the RISC nature of the PowerPC
instruction set and how much was the relative inefficiency of compiler code
generation. For a fairly recent ISA like RISC-V or ARM64, with a modern
compiler like clang, are things now better or worse? I imagine link-time
optimization helps some.

~~~
saagarjha
Both, probably. The CISC certainly would have made shorter, and since it was
hand-written it would probably do much better than the compilers of the day.

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donatj
The original Xbox has a similar problem coming up soon, I believe the clock
only goes up to 2022… I can't remember the exact year and it's become
impossible to Google thanks to the clock battery issues.

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beervirus
This web page looks like it’s straight out of 1999 itself. Why does it require
JavaScript to render?

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dhritzkiv
This doesn't answer your question, but the site looks to be made using Apple's
iWeb, interestingly. That's where the dependencies on JS may come in.

~~~
saagarjha
In fact,

    
    
      <meta name="Generator" content="iWeb 3.0.3">

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RedShift1
Can you force Chrome on Android to render this simplified? It's illegible
otherwise.

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skavi
is it just me, or did MacOS get uglier with each release?

