In the past month the news coverage of issues related to the coming millennium have flourished in all publications, on radio and television. The letters hint at the fact that the software implementations of time might generate uncertainties not just on January 1st, 2000. The funniest thing is that VMS internal time representation will work until July 31, 31086. The date is stored in a 13-bit value.
More recent systems are still vulnerable to time problems.
HTTP cache scheme should fail in 9999 and James Gosling admitted that Java will run out of dates in the year 292271023 . If everybody minded their own business , the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl , the world would go round a deal faster than it does. Which would not be an advantage , said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis. The issue is not limited to how well your particular system will handle time in the future, nor how well it can calculate the difference between two dates, one of which being in the future.