Dr J R Stockton wrote:
In uk.transport.london message , Sat, 2
Jan 2016 16:58:52, Richard J. posted:


You mean there was a very similar incident 16 years ago? But what is
special about 1/1/2016 compared to 1/1/2015, 1/1/2014, etc?

It is the first year 20xx for which xx cannot be stored in four bits.

If memory space was limited in a system designed a decade ago, someone
might have chosen to use just four bits for the variable part of the
year, thinking "Well, I'll not be in this job in 2016, ha ha!".

Well, as we soon learned, the problem wasn't any sort of Y2K issue. But in
any case, Y2K type bugs date from software designed 40 or more years ago,
when every byte mattered; Oyster is far too recent for the designers to
have been trying to save microscopic amounts of memory.