The Daily WTF

We’re still in the early part of the year, and as little glitches show up from “sliding window” fixes to the Y2K bug, we’re seeing more and more little stories of other date rollover weirdness in our inbox.

Like, for example, the Y2K15 bug, which Encore got to get surprised with. It feels like date issues are turning into a sports game franchise: new releases of the same thing every year.

A long, long time ago, Encore’s company released a piece of industrial machinery with an embedded controller. It was so long ago and so embedded that things like floating point operations were a little to newfangled and expensive to execute, and memory was at an extreme premium.

The engineer who originally designed the device had a clever solution to storing dates. One byte of EEPROM could be dedicated to storing the last two digits of the year. In RAM,

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