[Daniel's Intro] (Subtitles made by: Chaimann)
Hello there!
I recently made a video where I just showed how Windows 11 reacts to the year 10,000, just for fun.
So I blurted out a la...
"In addition to the 10000 year, there are many other interesting annual values at which various interesting things happen. If I interest you in any way, 2,000 likes under this video and I'm making a video about it."
Okay, so your reaction was unexpected - really surprising, in fact.
And honestly, I even felt a little worried, because I promised, after all, and time is always ticking away.
But now it's the time to fix this mistake.
In this video we will test how Windows performs at various years' values, discuss various yearly problems and there will be a nice bonus waiting for you at the end of the video.
Alright, here we go.
The comments on the last video I got were like "put a year with a negative value".
Okay, that's what I'll do on Windows 7.
Like usual, by using bcdedit I turn on the optionsedit parameter, reboot and enter /YEAR=-1, which means that I set -1 year.
The system shows the boot screen and...
The system shows the boot screen and that's it.
It will not boot further - the boot animation will keep on moving and the "Starting Windows" message will be displayed, without actually starting it.
Even if you wait an hour, even if two - it will still, shall we say, remain on this screen.
The system has stopped its work without even starting.
The same will happen with year 0 on Windows 7.
And yes, if you think that I somehow broke Windows on purpose, no.
Here it is - I just start it up without setting up a certain year and there you go, the system is successfully running and is fully functional.
Let's get back to the years.
However, Windows XP did not allow this - when you set the year 0, it quietly sets the year, ...
...which was already set before this change, meanwhile I turned off time synchronization with the Internet everywhere, and disabled it in the system at all.
But if you set year -1 in Windows XP, the system just shows a black screen - it is, in fact, a dead end.
It is worth mentioning that the kernel was loaded properly, as we went through the boot screen and actually saw the cursor.
Thus, the problem is in the system software itself.
It is also not possible to set a three-digit year in Windows, as the minimum year limit for Windows is 1601.
You will find out later why it was 1601.
For example, I set year 666, and the result on Windows XP is just the same: a black screen with the cursor all alone, ...
...and on Windows 10 it just ignores the /YEAR parameter, ...
...because it doesn't contain the minimum number of digits - which, for that matter, consists of 4 digits.
Let's move forward.
The Year 2000 problem.
You probably have heard about it, and some of you have even experienced it. So, what was the problem associated with? How did it happen in the first place?
The problem was that many software developers in the 20th century were using two characters to represent the year in dates.
For instance, January 1, 1998 was shown as 01.01.98 - having two digits of the year.
When year 2000 approached, many programs failed because the year 99 was replaced by a year with two zeros in two-digit representation, and naturally the programs had no idea that there were other years besides the period between 1900 and 1999.
So there were two ways to go - either the year zero was being shown, or the same thing, but for 1900.
Both the first and the second outcome could have caused a serious program failure..
The opinions on this issue were split - someone thought that an enormous number of malfunctions were avoided because of the on-time problem detection, ...
...and others felt that the problem was being artificially "hyped up" for the sake of profit and revenue, with most of the programs having such a problem simply being outdated and irrelevant.
And what about Windows?
These versions of Windows did not contain this problem and easily survived the year 2000 transition, including Windows 3.1.
And so did Linux.
Year 2010.
This is rather just a fun bug in the Windows OS, although only its mobile version, called Windows Mobile.
The thing is that when you receive a new text message back in 2010, the system would suddenly set the date for them 6 years into the future and actually ...
...the messages and any notifications were from 2016, rather than 2010. Basically, messages from the future :D
Year 2038.
This year is the peak year for older 32-bit UNIX-like operating systems.
It's all about how UNIX systems count the date and time - each second, they add one digit to the time value variable that's higher than its previous number.
All of this is counted since January 1, 1970.
As for programming, the 32-bit number limits at 2,147,483,647.
When the time hits January 19, 2038, at 3 hours 14 minutes and 8 seconds Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) ...
...the value overflows, causing the transition to either 1901 or 1970 for the user, and from a programming point of view, the number turns negative.
Nowadays, the majority of hardware and software is migrating from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit one.
64-bit processors, 64-bit systems, etc.
The Linux kernel doesn't have this issue as of version 5.6, which came out in early 2020, ...
...while Windows did a simpler thing - they simply refused to release the 32-bit version of the system as a whole in version 11.
As such, there is no 32-bit Windows anymore - everything ended with 10.
As for the 64-bit time format, the end date is still a long way off - more than 200 billion years from now.
Thus, this problem is likely to affect only non-updated and old hardware.
(In fact, I doubt that it will be in full operation in 2038.)
2108 is the final year for major FAT modifications and the ZIP archive format
The FAT (aka File Allocation Table) file system debuted back in 1980 and eventually got four modifications: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and exFAT (also referred as FAT64), but there are many more of them.
The FAT16 and FAT32 file systems were the standard for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x era.
But why exactly the year 2108?
The fact is that the time of last modification/creation of a file or folder is stored with an accuracy of +-2 seconds, as a 2-byte field is allocated for it, which can contain only 65536 unique values.
As a part of calculations it was found out that the maximum year value in the pre-FAT32 filesystem family is 2107.
And when the year 2108 came, the date went back to 1980.
Simply put, these are technical limits and specific features of the file system.
But what did ZIP-archives have to do with it? Well, ZIP archives use a FAT timestamp, and as mentioned earlier, the maximum year here is 2107.
Compared to FAT-like file systems, the situation is much better with NTFS.
The NTFS file system was developed by Microsoft in cooperation with IBM and made its first appearance in Windows NT 3.1, released back in 1993.
NTFS stands for New Technology File System, which refers to the brand new Windows NT back then.
There are a total of six versions of this file system. The most recent one is NTFS 3.1, introduced back in 2001 alongside Windows XP.
The date range here begins with 1601 and ends with 60056.
However, you can't change this year in Windows 10: it somehow sets the year to 8192 and makes it practically impossible to open anything.
But at the same time, the CPU and the system itself has practically zero load.
Windows XP is showing a black screen again while Windows 7 displays a permanent boot screen.
Okay, Windows is just Windows, but what about Linux and its distributions?
Linux doesn't really care at all.
No matter whether you set the year 10000, 1970, 2038, it makes absolutely no difference to the system - it's just not bothered at all.
And yes, please note that it's being tested on Debian 11, as it suits me the best.
So, however, there is one BUT about the years...
... the date command prevents you from setting the three-digit years and the year that exceeds 2233 - I'm simply notified of an "invalid argument", ...
...although, for example, 2021 or 2040 are easily set.
And what's the bottom line?
I thought it would be much more impressive and cooler, but it is what it is.
Still, I was curious to check that out, for sure.
Of course, I have shown here the most extraordinary and significant years that could do something to the system.
So if you liked this video, please put a big thumbs up so that (I) can see your activity.
And that's about it. All my social media links and music track names are listed in the description.
Thank you for watching and until we meet again!