Manifested worries about the Y2K38 and Y2K40

[LTV2008_mac]

Hello, I don't post often in this forum, in fact, my last post was in 2024. Despite this, this is still an interesting thing to talk about.

Hello, as you may know, in year's time, (around 13-15 years) there will be time overflow errors in UNIX (2038) and HFS/HFS+ (2040), similar to the Y2K bug. This can potentially affect systems running Mac OS X.
Will old Mac hardware still work?
Will there be patches (software and hardware)?
Will there be better emulators in the future?

Sorry for the vague and potentially doomsday-ish question, i just wanted to ask.

 

[Nixontheknight]

Hello, I don't post often in this forum, in fact, my last post was in 2024. Despite this, this is still an interesting thing to talk about.

Hello, as you may know, in year's time, (around 13-15 years) there will be time overflow errors in UNIX (2038) and HFS/HFS+ (2040), similar to the Y2K bug. This can potentially affect systems running Mac OS X.
Will old Mac hardware still work?
Will there be patches (software and hardware)?
Will there be better emulators in the future?

Sorry for the vague and potentially doomsday-ish question, i just wanted to ask.

for 32-bit 68K Macs, they'll probably survive up to 2040, and I bet you future patches will make them work. For PowerPC, I imagine they can process years well after 2040, especially G3 and newer

 

[JDW]

Hello, I don't post often in this forum, in fact, my last post was in 2024. Despite this, this is still an interesting thing to talk about.

It is a very important topic, and as such, I would encourage you to post in the forum more because you are helping us to think about these matters.

What's interesting is that some people working the problem say things like: "I am not sure that anybody will use HFS/HFS+ after 2040." Which of course totally and utterly ignores the vintage Mac hobby community.

@David Cook talks about "brave souls trying to fix the 2040 issue" here.
And the reason for that word "brave" becomes clear when you read what David says here:

Y2K2020 Date Problem System 7

I think there was some utility that would programmatically go through and correct them, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it was called... Does TechTool Pro do that? I know Norton Utilities does, it complains about bad dates and fixes them.

68kmla.org

I guess no one will be incentivized to fix the problem until faced with it in 2040. Or will we turn to AI for that?