Unix Year 2038 problem and the art of underestimating

In Linux, I recall the whole Large File Support saga dragging on into the 2.4 era. It certainly wasn't universal until well after 2 GB devices had become commonplace even in consumer-level hardware, meaning that things like creating a whole disk image were impossible for several years.

There were a bunch of similar problems with hardware device support at around the same time - various BIOS, MBR, and partition size limits affecting 512 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB disks (I think - my memory is pretty hazy).

Even further back, there was the infamous 32 MB partition limit in DOS 3.3 and earlier, which was still being sold with new machines at a time when 40 MB disks had become standard. Pretty much everyone in the late 80s had an awkward 8 MB D: drive hanging around as a result.

By those standards, the Y2038 problem has been handled ridiculously far in advance!

There are undoubtedly still issues in legacy apps around Y2036/Y2038 waiting to bite us, and further ahead there's likely to be some hangover in 2060/70 from the hacks put in place to deal with the Y2K issue. We might see a small army of centenarian COBOL programmers being paid very handsomely indeed...

Pretty sure a 64-bit integer gets us to the death of our sun with several powers of 10 left over.

Sol won’t ever go nova, though, so I’m not sure how one would calculate the number of seconds until that happens.

Y2038, meanwhile, is just an artifact of the limitations of older hardware.