For those that can remember, January 1st, 2000 was the year that was going to crash computers, airplanes, and start World War III. The problem was that a lot of programs assumed 19 as the first two digits of the year. By using this assumption, programmers could save two bytes. Nowadays, two bytes is a rounding error with storage and memory, but in the 70s and 80s, every byte counted. To correct the issue, the good programmers switched the storage to 4 bytes, allowing the entire year to be stored. Unfortunately, there were some programmers that decided they had a better fix. Their fix was to assume that years 21-99 were in the 20th century, and 00-20 were in the 21st. The problem is that these programs are still running, and will think that next year is 1921.
In 2000, Steve Jobs had only been back to Apple for 2 years and had already struck gold with the iMac. His next act was OS X, which he demoed 20 years ago. OS X is now called macOS, and every Mac, iPhone, and iPad uses it as their operating system.
Speaking of the Mac at Apple, there is only one remaining usage of the word “Macintosh”.
Here is the office setup that I need.
The 80s were all about vehicles. Whether it was the General Lee, Kitt, the F15 in Top Gun, the top secret jet in Firefox, or the A-Team’s van, a lot of TV shows and movies had some cool vehicle. Not to be outdone, there was also helicopters. In a fight, who would win, Airwolf or Blue Thunder?
The Sega Megadrive (Genesis for the US) can be used to create a pretty cool synthesizer:
Did you know that there are secret codes that you can use to find movies and movies and TV Shows on Netflix?
Do you have a lot of CDs you’d like to rip? And, do you have some Lego bricks? Maybe they could help you shuffle through the disks: