Am | G | |
Once in a darkened | office cube |
F | E | |
A | hacker peered int | o his tube |
Am | G | |
And | saw a vision | of despair |
F | G | |
Of | bugs and | crashes everywhere |
C | G | |
F | ollowed by cha | os and woe |
F | E | Am | |
F | rom arithmetic | overfl | ow. |
Am | C | |
The h | acker put a message on the N | et |
Dm | E | |
That s | aid ``you folks had better not | forget: |
That soon'' |
Am The century is ending at last
Am And when it does your systems will crash
G When date f ields overflow it will be long ago
Am No way to be a hero
G Em E7 Am And only printed paper will surv ive Y ear Z ero
The CIO of one large bank |
Said ``customers have me to thank |
For noticing that EBCDIC |
In two-byte fields has 16 bits. |
We'll update all our files in place |
And not use up a bit more space.'' |
The hacker said ``I'm not completely sold-- |
I think I'll take my balance out in gold. |
Because...'' |
A unix wizard said, ``You know |
We solved that problem long ago |
Our date and time are binary |
Seconds since 1970, |
We'll recompile in time enough |
Don't bother me with mainframe stuff.'' |
The hacker said ``I don't think you should wait-- |
You only have till 2038. |
Meanwhile...'' |
A tycoon with huge market share |
Said ``Trust me, I control software |
And I can say just what all fields |
Contain and what a function yields; |
So you can just sit back and wait-- |
It's fixed in Windows 98.'' |
The hacker said ``I'm sure you'll have it done |
In time for Christmas in 2001.'' |
At last the year changed, on the dot |
From 99 to double-ought. |
Just as the hacker had expected |
For clocks cannot be write-protected. |
On New Years' morning people woke to groan, |
``Oh dreadful day--if only we had known |
But now |
The century has ended at last
And when it did our systems all crashed
Our date fields overflow; now our programs won't go.
No way to be a hero
And only printed paper has survived Year Zero.''
\spoken{Yes calendars on paper have survived... the programmers and hackers have survived... VMS and Unix have survived... the beta release of Windows Zero is expected on January $1^{\rm st}$, 1970... } |
Those fortunate people who have not encountered the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code will want to know that ``EBCDIC'' is pronounced ``{\sc ebb}-suh-dick.''
Stephen Savitzky
<steve @savitzky.net >
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