Dec 04, 2006
it's in an AP story, it must be true!
A quote from a story in today's paper:
"NASA wants Discovery back from it's mission by New Year's Eve because shuttle computers aren't designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the 1st day of the new year while in flight."
??????? My watch is able to do that.
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Technoratiaquadextrous, adj.:
Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off
with your toes.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off
with your toes.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
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You have to remember when the shuttle fleet was built. Microcomputers were relatively new. NASA programmers are legendary for sticking entire operating systems into 47 bytes of memory.
The shuttle fleet also predates the Y2K scare, and given that the programmers were always shaving bytes, they never even tried to be Y2K compliant - and would've likely failed as this would've required at least one extra byte of storage which would only be accessed once or twice ever. So the situation now isn't that the computers can't roll over at the end of the year. The issue is that if they roll over any year, they will need to go back and be certified for Y2K. They've conveniently avoided the issue for the last 6-7 years by not having anybody flying on New Years.