The Apex operating system for the Apple II, Sage/Stride, Macintosh, and Amiga, has a Y2104 problem. The Apex date format has a 7-bit year, and its epoch started with 1976.
AFAIK, there are no plans to deal with it.
#retrocomputing
@brouhaha@mastodon.social the GPS system’s date rolls over every 19.7 years (1024 weeks). Most receivers are smart enough to figure out that if the week number rolls over to 0, that the next epoch has begun. Some receivers are not smart and get stuck in the same 19.7 year cycle. Weirdly it seems the more the receiver originally cost, the less likely it is to properly handle a rollover.
@keelan@mastodon.sdf.org @brouhaha@mastodon.social This makes sense, considering that there's a very strong correlation between its original price and how old it is.
@anymouse_404@glitch.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social this phenomenon even applies to similar age receivers. I have a Garmin consumer grade receiver from the early 2000s that I paid $200 for that survived the 2019 rollover unscathed. I have surveying receivers from the same era that would have cost $10,000 that did not roll over properly. There are numerous fixes they could have easily applied to the fancy receivers, but didn't. I strongly suspect it was a case of engineered obsolescence.
@keelan@mastodon.sdf.org @anymouse_404@glitch.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social
Most receivers have a "set time" command.
If you unplug the antenna, and the repeatedly set the time in six month increments until now-ish, then attach the antenna, most receivers will take the clue.
But you may have to do that song and dance after every power-cycle.
@phloggen@expressional.social @anymouse_404@glitch.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social the receivers even have an EEPROM that stores a table of enabled features, they have a hidden password locked system for managing this EEPROM, they could have stored the epoch there in a single byte, but chose not to. Instead they deliberately made a firmware update the only way to fix the week number epoch.
@keelan@mastodon.sdf.org @anymouse_404@glitch.social @brouhaha@mastodon.social
If it is a very early receiver, they are excused, nobody thought about the roll over problem until it happened first time - including the designers of the signal.
🇺🇦
haxadecimal 🚫
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Keelan
