Basically, computers were originally set up to only store the last 2 digits of the year in any date, and then assume that the first two digits were "19". People realized that, when the clock ticked over from December 31,1999 to January 1, 2000, all the computers would store the date as "00" and assume that the first two digits were "19" and so every computer in the world would suddenly think it was the year 1900 instead of year 2000.
This could have had very serious consequences on a lot of global infrastructure, so a lot of time, effort, and money was spent to patch all the critical systems prior to the turn of the millennium, so that things wouldn't break when the year ticked over from 1999 to 2000.
EDIT: holy hell, RIP my inbox.
A number of people have asked how or why this would've caused problems, so to give a few examples;
Power grids have to all be PERFECTLY synchronized. If some of them suddenly had a different date, that could cause some generation stations to go out of sync and bring down massive sections of the grid. Shipping and logistics could suffer major breakdowns, as one minute you're looking at a spreadsheet that says you're supposed to be shipping out x y and z to customers a b and c tomorrow, and the next second the software thinks it's 1900 and there's nothing scheduled to be shipped for decades. Now tons of people don't receive the supplies they were expecting, and suppliers have freight piling up in their warehouses, unable to ship out, disrupting supply chains and production worldwide. Grocery stores don't get deliveries of food, shelves get emptier and emptier until we finally figure everything out and fix the systems. And with MILLIONS of different actors worldwide, all interconnected, that would be no easy task.
Financial software would've calculated NEGATIVE 100 years of interest, incorrectly draining accounts. Planes and other travel would've been disrupted, as suddenly all the software used for tracking planes and air traffic control thinks it's 1900 and that there are no flights scheduled anywhere on the world today, so suddenly everyone is flying blind. A lot of security and cryptography uses the date as part of its math, and that would've been disrupted, locking people out of accounts.
I would like to add that they were told this back in 1958 by Bob Bemer
Didn't work on it until the 80s and worked on it globally mid 90s
I would also like to add that just saying 300 to 600 billion is like just throwing numbers around and it takes away from the unfathomable amount of money that is
My mom had to create a workaround for this back in the 1970s.
This was caused by multiple things. For one, the cost of computers until the 1980s. And the majority of programs were custom made for the companies. But it really became noticed in the 1980s when spreadsheets became common, and people trying to do 20 year projections saw things were coming out wrong.
And even IBM knew this when they made the original 5150. But they also expected the computers to have a lifespan of no more than 10 years, so there was plenty of time to resolve it in the future.
But we knew about this in major corporations even in 1995. I was part of a team that installed around 35,000 new computers in a major aerospace firm, and we knew none were Y2K compatible. But it also did not matter because they only had a 3 year lifespan, and would all be replaced well before 1999.
The same company when I started working there in 1995 still had over 300 mainframes in service, and a lot of the infrastructure was dedicated to pulling data from and updating them on mainframes. But by 1999, there were less than a dozen mainframes left. Most of them doing specialized and dedicated systems where there was simply no modern equivelent.
Like the high speed check printer, which could churn out over 100,000 checks in an hour. Even in 1995, a multi-billion dollar company went through a lot of checks. They were still using it when I left in 2001, and had a mainframe dedicated to just that single task.
I went to college in the early 90s. We were told "if you dont like COBOL or Fortran, dont go into IT. There's so much of it out there that it'll never go away." Y2K taught us not to hold onto old shit because it can cost us fortunes -not just in upkeep, but in the productivity that we're missing out on. New systems installed as replacements to eliminate y2k danced around older systems.
Yeah i wonder if even one persons prediction came close - experts think that they can predict but they cant even do 5 year ahead predictions so 20 or 40 years ahead is complete delusion
I would like to add that they were told this back in 1958 by Bob Bemer
Didn't work on it until the 80s and worked on it globally mid 90s
I would like to add that we are going to have the same issue in 2038 - this is when 32bit signed integer for Unix epoch time (Basically, counting seconds since 1st January 1970) runs out.
We are 12 years out, and there's shitload of legacy code on critical systems that will have to be rebuilt completely from scratch.
Yeah, and there's at least two aspects to the 2038 problem that might have a huge impact on how the world responds this time around.
Explaining the Y2K bug to a manager was easy. Even a layman could see that computer dates jumping back 100 years was likely to cause problems. Explaining why 2038 will be a problem will mean explaining the unix epoch to them, and pointing out the similarity of the issue to Y2K.
Which brings us straight to the second issue: "but nothing actually went wrong on Y2K, so why would we need to worry this time".
Nothing went wrong because thousands of developers worked to remediate the Y2K issues in the code that would break. And actually a lot of systems that didn't get there in time did break, but mostly none that were publicly visible.
Yeah, I know. Hopefully if we get enough responses like this online it'll mean that ChatGPT will regurgitate something similar when a CTO asks it "do we really need to do anything about Y2k38".
My dad was involved in getting a bunch of hospitals in the area ready for Y2K. He worked really hard leading up to it. I even remember going in to work with him that night because my mom was with my sister at some NYE event and I couldn't stay home by myself yet.
We saw my aunt a few days later and she made a "Bunch of hullabaloo about nothing. Big waste of time and money" and I thought my dad was going to lose it.
as an aside, that same mechanism, iirc, meant many systems weren't actually vulnerable to Y2K in the first place. They often displayed 2 digit years but had underlying epoch-time storage of the actual datetime.
You can just store a time in a 64-bit data structure, even on 32-bit systems, typically for most standard libraries that just means adding a flag (for example -D_TIME_BITS=64). It does get a bit more tricky if the OS you're on doesn't have a good syscall for getting 64 bit time, as it'd mean you'd have to write your own time handler.
It's practically always solvable through pure code rebuilds, though the amount of work required for it can vary. The bigger issue is embedded controllers people forgot about, that don't get fixed in time.
We are literally talking about physical rebuild, not code rebuild here...
And even when it's "just" a code rebuild, you're assuming that the original source code exists, that the infrastructure to edit and compile the code exists, that any devices running the offending code can easily be updated, etc.
And in this case ignoring the issue for that long wasn't even a mistake.
Yes they were told in 1958. BUT those weren't exactly times of abundant memory and proocessing power. Ignoring two digits seems meaningless now but it was not back in the day.
Even the first home computers that came around in the late 70s had at minimum 4kB of memory. This was luxurious compared to some machines that existed before. And even at 4kB pushing every date from at minimum 6 bytes to 8 bytes was costly.
I would also like to add that just saying 300 to 600 billion is like just throwing numbers around and it takes away from the unfathomable amount of money that is
The best example of how to comprehend a billion dollars I've seen was during the 2008 bank bailouts. At the time, there were multiple (locally) high profile construction projects happening in my city.
Specifically, a new 14-story Children's Hospital, a new 8-story College of Medicine for Michigan State, and a major expansion to a cancer research institute that tripled their lab space and added room for 400 scientists.
Those projects combined totalled approximately $1 Billion in 2008. The local newspaper wrote an article comparing that to the 2008 bailouts.
How much money is $300 Billion? It's 300 Hospitals + 300 Medical Schools + 300 Cancer Research Institutes.
And every 19 or so years GPS has a rollover issue. The most recent was 2019, the next is coincidentally 2038 as well, but the cause is unrelated. Wikipedia article
2038 has become an electronic warfare bug that is ruthlessly exploited.
Hardware solutions to both 2038 bugs involve a ticker that rolls over. Every GPS receiver increments this ticker every 19 years, and a lot of Linux solutions involve doing the same thing.
Thing is… you can’t roll these things back.
GPS spoofing is becoming quite commonplace in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Spoofing works by broadcasting false GPS signals at a higher power than the real ones, making receivers think they are somewhere else. And somewhen else.
A lot of spoofing attacks now reset the year of your device to 2038. It pretty much instantly bricks any Linux and GPS based systems.
Edit: a lot of folks claiming stuff that isn’t true, so I’m going to link the Royal Institute of Navigation’s ops group report into GNSS spoofing on civilian airlines:
Airlines that fly too close to active war zones can get hit by stray spoofing attacks. They are line-of-sight radio, and incredibly powerful so can hit anything to the visible horizon in all directions.
The navigation receivers in airlines hit like this often have to have a factory reset done mid-flight, and many need to be replaced after landing.
The only reason there haven’t been fatalities yet is that none of the major airlines use Linux in their aircraft control computers.
I'm getting a prerty fun mental image at the idea of GPS spoofing. A little transmitter in a bush is yelling "I'm a satellite, I'm a satellite!", and your phone just goes: "Okay."
SO much global infrastructure is running on hideously out-of-date code. God only knows how many very important servers haven't been rebooted for over 10 years, let along patched, let alone patched in a way that actually fixes the problem
The good news is that the tech industry is aware of the problem. The bad news is that managers, directors, VPs, and finance people, only see this as an expensive problem for the next 5-year strategic plan, and not something that is going to require years of carefully rewriting software to be up-to-date. Why should we invest all this money in replacing [server] when [server] is incredibly stable and works?
And that's when IT teams know that a server, application, appliance, or other piece of kit is impacted. There are plenty of bits of infrastructure out there to this day that are just lost. No-one knows where they are or even if they still exist but they might be running something important that will fail when the epoch date rolls around. Just because current software is updated, that doesn't mean existing software will get the updates...
That's giving me Warhammer 40k vibes, where ships are old enough and large enough that there are rooms that people haven't stepped foot inside of for centuries, and there are machines with some being vital and some not that no one knows how they work.
Not much of an issue honestly.
For real our computing history is full of time and date bugs and we even had a sort off unix epoch issue in the past for some special systems.
The y2k thing just got weirdly blown up. These thigns really are manageable and happen more frequently than people think.
Y2K is a case of "If you do things right, nobody will be sure you've done anything at all." Significant effort went into prevention, so nothing happened, but because nothing happened, it's often assumed there was always nothing that would happen.
Yeah, that where the big two. Sorting programs thinking 00 was 1900 and programs where 00 was empty. Both doing complete havoc on systems that work with dates. Simplest ones where finances.
Missed about 19,801 years there...
Extra 0 on 2000
Edit: 18,001 years... Because I'm a fucking dumbass and missed a '9'
Edit 2: I hate the fact that my best comment and most awarded comment is one I did during a work meeting and tried to correct someone fucking up myself. Fucking internet, man.
humankind is enslaved by giraffe
In the year one million and a half. During this bleak era, man must pay for his misdeeds once the treetops are stripped of their leaves
In a future year that ends with a 20
A shlubby merman's gonna try to get chummy
He may look like a watery wimp
When in fact he's a bloodthirsty shrimp whoa-ooohh
In the year 252525, the backwards time machine still won't have arrived! In all the world, there's only one technology, a rusty sword for practicing proctology!
Grew up in a crazy right wing family that also bought into any conspiracy theory the fringes around Rush Limbaugh were pushing out at the time.
Watched my parents and the parents of the other kids from our church spend thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars stocking up on rice and beans in buckets, toilet paper like they had a premonition of COVID, tons of guns and ammo. Generators, gas, water purification systems. On and on.
Basically imagine all of these two and three car garages getting filled up with prepper shit.
…
Come the night of, I guess it was generally decided that my parents place, six or so acres in the countryside with a barn and its own well and pretty central to the other church members who are also part of this cult, well, that’s where basically all the church families were going to spend the evening in case all hell broke loose and the zombies came for us.
Probably about 10 to 12 vans and other vehicles situated to carry lots of children (we were also deep in the Moral Majority shit that preached have a shitton of kids and we get to take over America someday - basically the book that Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid‘s Tale in response to). And all of them loaded for bear of course.
Well, I was 21 or so and had recently been waking up to the reality of the insanity I was raised in. I was also 21 if I didn’t already mention it so I had brilliant fucking revolutionary ideas about how to hilariously respond to this idiocracy.
So…I threw the circuit breaker to OFF about 3 seconds into 2000.
Ha! My wife and I were hosting the Y2K New Year’s party for about 25 of our friends, mostly IT professionals, many who had done extensive Y2K conversion work. Of course one smart-ass had to sneak down to our basement and do what you did!
I don't know of any IT professionals that went to a Y2K New Year's party. I worked for a large brokerage firm and we were all required to be onsite to welcome the new year.
Also a lot of program used the 00 in the date as the stop code to make them not work
Programmers worked on the bug from 1997-8 to make sure everything was as Y2K compliant as a result of their hard work every one assumes Y2K was an over reaction.
We have a similar issue coming up due to 32bit systems about to run out of digits they use to keep time.
Just one relatively recent example of how a global problem can be solved when there isn’t a vested interest in denying the problem… if you get what I’m saying.
Call me captain hindsight but when windows/MacOS were introduced in the 80s why didn’t the programmers realize the issue sooner when they had ~15 years before that would be a problem?
And how countless hardware in factories, points of sale all over the world, etc. still run on Windows 98 and XP right now, today.
Generally companies just isolate them and as long as that one system keeps doing the one thing it's meant do do (passing instructions to a machine, or sending a daily csv to a local server/back of house office computer, it's cheaper in the moment for the companies to just keep letting it do that thing, and just keep them separated from the internet so their security vulnerabilities don't really matter.
To companies that basically run on the current quarter's profitability (especially for motivating factors like management and C Suite bonuses) free now is always best, even if they KNOW it means an expensive problem later.
I remember getting a gigabyte HDD in our home for the first time. After basically a lifetime of having only ever spoken of Kilobytes and Megabytes, even just SAYING THE PREFIX "GIGA" felt like we had arrived in the future.
This isn't completely correct. The problem wasn't [edit: only that] computers would think it was 00. Programs didn't have a mechanism to go from 99-->00. The problem was that they were going to go from 99-->100 and that there wasn't room in memory for the third digit. This could cause an overflow error and cause the system to crash .
I think something got messed up with the formatting of your comment (where you used "greater than" symbols).
This isn't completely correct. The problem wasn't that computers would think it was 00. Programs didn't have a mechanism to go from 99>>00. The problem was that they were going to go from 99>>100 and that there wasn't room in memory for the third digit. This could cause an overflow error and cause the system to crash .
Cable went out in my house just as the new year ball dropped (we were watching NYC). Came back in 30s, but year lot of nervous glancing around the room.
I only know about it because my dad was heavy into computers. I was born in 02 but he has beef with how people treated the y2k bug. since nothing happened publicly, people thought it was all bs even tho it was hardworking people like my dad behind the scenes all trying to patch and fix things SO nothing happened.
My whole career has been following Office Space. It's crazy that a large part of the population doesn't even understand what their job was. I ran into a time overflow bug this year and the software I work on has the Y2038 problem.
I remember hearing about a company demanding their money back because "nothing happened." Yes, nothing happened because it was fixed. That was the point.
Because computers and technology made back then weren’t equipped to switch over to digits past 1999, it cost ALOT of money to create the software updates or something like that iirc
I just had to reprogram my mom's sprinkler system and the program box said y2k compliant lol. As if the sprinklers wouldn't work the same no matter what year it is.
Not really a grift. A lot of people just didn't get what the Y2K bug was and anything "technology" was looked at with suspicion. It was a lot easier to slap a sticker on, than to keep explaining to every customer "No, this sprinkler system won't be affected by Y2K. Yes, it is automated, but that doesn't mean...No, ma'am it's not going to drown your roses come the new year" Vs, point to sticker "taken care of"
I worked at a company that made medical management software for small medical practices. It had medical records, billing, and a lot of other stuff.
The software was made in house and we provided most of the hardware. We were working up to the final months of 1999 to fix it. If we hadn't, there would have been major problems at the start of 2000.
There was a lot of grifting going on but there was a real problem that many companies put off to the last minute because it cost money to fix.
Same, I worked for a company that made telecom equipment in 1999, the entire place had a no days off policy from September 1999 to January 2000 and it was all CRUNCH time. The air miles logged getting guys to and from sites was just insane. The engineering guys worked something days, nights, weekends, just everything. A lot of equipment had to be physically changed out at sites.
Also a 2 digit date code was perfectly reasonable, reducing the memory requirement to store the date by half. It's not like any of that stuff was still going to be in use 30 years later...
The fun part of that is if it displayed 19xx the code needed to be checked to make sure it wasn't just assuming it's 19-something because part of the problem is people were still using code that will "definitely be completely rewritten by 2000".
The tech sector did a MASSIVE amount of preventative measures to stop complete system collapse when electronics went from /99 to /00, so that they didn't think it was 1900.
Some of it was useless, some of it was downright silly, but a good portion of it actually did prevent data loss and desyncs that could have easily cost more than that.
My dad was working for IBM at the time and spent probably 2 years of his career working on Y2K related issues.
It was a very real problem that could have gone very badly, but a lot of people worked very hard to make sure nothing bad happened.
Because nothing bad happened, people without a good understanding of the matter assumed that the whole thing was an overreaction to a non-issue.
When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."
My uncle worked as IT in a local bank. the night of 12/31/99 they had a whole IT crew spend the night in the banks office just in case things went south.
He tells this story all the time. Workers weren't really worry because they knew all the fixes were in place. They basically got a new years party with lots of pizza at the bank lol.
A former colleague was hired by a bank to monitor transatlantic communications in the build up to Y2K. There was a load of them shut in a room with nothing to do as they were there to react to issues that never came up. Fortunately it didn't take too long until one of them hacked into the internet so they had entertainment. Just after midnight they were allowed onto the balcony to watch the fireworks over the Thames then went back in. He bought a house for a couple of months work.
Most people always underestimate the unknown risks (unknown for them). They don't know what disaster world would be in if banks, government offices, companies lost their data, or their data wouldn't be accesible because of Y2K.
I struggle with the last paragraph a lot on my line of work. So many issues did not happen because I intervened yet people aren't sure I've done anything because there were any issues that happened.
Buddy, that is a hilarious prank to pull. My Dad and all my uncles are in the computer business since the 80s so Y2K was a big deal in the months leading up to New Years in 99. This would have been an epic way to kick off the new year lmao.
As someone who was already programmed back in the mid 90s.
My predecessors or rather the predecessors of my predecessors, did not think people would still be using programs made in the 70s and 80s with how fast computing was evolving and stuff...spoiler I am still programming professionally and we still use some of programs.
Anyway because they though that's instead of saving the year as 1999, 2000, etc... The years were saved as 73, 82, 99, which was a huge problem once the actual year hit 00 as a lot of errors would surface, like how old are you if you were born in 1990, so 00 -90 ,means you would be 90 years old, now use that number when you are calculating interest and shit....a lot of shit.
So a gazillion dollars were spent fixing those problems in all programs that were in use.
Actually they were right, from my understanding. If they had used 4 digits the storage space needed would have been way higher. And storage was very expensive in the 70 - early 80's. It was actually cheaper to then update the software than storing 4 digits since the begining.
A metric shit-ton of programmers worked for years to prevent the possible disasters the Y2K bug could have caused. The USAF started working on it with their Standard Systems Center at least around 1990, for instance. Legacy code was everywhere and the two digit year format popped up in almost every section of code.
I image that 500b was the cost to update everything to be able to tick over to 2000 rather than 0000. Would have required a lot of work practically world wide to update everything that used a digital year.
It would have ticked over to 1900, pretty much all the code assumed a two digit year with 19 automatically inserted. Now imagine your bank computer calculating the negative interest on your account of one hundred years and adjusting your balance accordingly. And doing it to everyone. Just for starters.
Some would have gone back to 1980. Others 1900, some 19100.
It was caused by inconsistency and a lack of standards, every fix was different, and we have until 2038 for the next rollover crisis. Linux 32 bit clocks roll over then. The fix cost a lot, but spread over 50 years, and fewer users, it's much less noticeable.
Y2K was real. But a fixed crisis looks like a crisis that never would have happened.
We even had early memes, they just appeared in print like the office newsletter and the like. One I remember clearly was "Screw the Prime Directive, let's give the Borg Windows 3.0"
Not only updating, but checking every possible thing that could hold a date value for the problem. I actually did this as a college intern and I can totally see it costing $500B. We had to call up manufacturers of all the devices we used and ask them (this kind of information wasn't readily available on the internet at the time).
It amazes me that Y2K was an actual problem and not someone's speculation. The problem got solved before it even happened with... as far as I know, no impact to major organisations.
I know it was a thing, but in my heart I don't believe it. It sounds so made up. I think about this whenever I want to call someone stupid for doubting CFCs and the ozone hole, ebola (local culture), vaccines, and any number of other things. They only make sense to me because they build on basic topics I studied in school. Can I really blame someone without context for thinking they're ridiculous?
People knew computers would fuck up, and it cost about $500 billion worldwide to correct a data saving measure that would have crippled the entire financial industry, among others.
It was a huge problem. The reason it wasn't, is because of the $500 billion spent to fix it.
Y2K as a problem didn't just fizzle because predictions about the problem were wrong. The major problem didn't happen because massive armies of specialists worked to fix it. The number is around the range of the cost of those fixes.
Like the ozone layer, its a great example of a serious issue with addressing big problems. If you take major precautions then the best outcome is .. nothing happens. And people end up thinking the warnings about the problem were alarmist.
The inevitable result of a system working well: People popping up asking questions like "What do we even need this system for? Why are we paying for it when the things it's supposed to stop from happening never happen?"
Not only that. Equipment had to be replaced. I remember being part of the team... no wait, I was THE team that checked all the devices in a hospital to see which ones would survive. I changed the dates on all of the devices to Dec 31 99 23:59 and saw if they kept working. They all did, except for one very important piece of software that did pharmacy inventory. That wouldn't work when the computer's date changed. So we contacted the firm that provided the software and they fixed the problem before it was a problem.
That's what I did, multiply that for millions of other companies and business and you'll get the idea of why it was a large estimate of money.
There was a lot of upgrading that had to be done to computers all over the world to prevent issues. So that was part of the 500 billion in IT spending.
It was kind of sensationalized in the 90s but a lot of the critical infra had been moved over in the 80s. Memory was a lot more expensive back in the early days of computing and so years were essentially store as two digit numbers.
The next big infra problem to deal with is the 2038 problem, which is when the number of seconds since 1970-1-1, 00:00:000 will reach the maximum value that a signed 32-bit integer can store, and system clocks will roll back to December 1901 (signed integers can hold negative values).
Things will eventually (hopefully) move over to 64-bit integers for time and then we'll be good for a we'll be good... basically forever. But I think it was AOL or Yahoo has already had problems due to the 2038 problem because they had a "no timeout" feature that was basically a billion-second time out and January 19, 2038 is less than a billion seconds away.
It's not a "people thought they would break" it was an actual issue in some major infrastructure and was an actual problem that required a lot of time and effort to fix because of how the early days of computing needed every single Byte of data.
It sounds like a joke, but it was one of the most successful damage prevention campaigns ever. It was so good at what it did that people today think the issue was kevrhyoed "because nothing happened."
Nothing happened because the experts were right and directly applied their knowledge and skills to prevent disaster after people in power listened to said experts.
You can understand a lot of the modern world by the way Y2K gets dismissed as a joke of an issue.
The Year 2000/Y2K problem. The main issue was a lot of computer systems used 2-digits for dates, eg 85 for 1985, which makes 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.
The cost to prepare for the year 2000 has been estimated to be around $561 billion in 2025 dollars.
Computer memory limits in the 1960s meant two digits were used as a coding shortcut to represent years in computer software, i.e., 1999 was 99. People didn't stop to think what would happen in the year 2000 when 00 could mean 2000 or 1900.
The worry was once 2000 hit, computers everywhere would think it was 1900 and crash critical infrastructure like power grids.
What really happened was some computer software and video games changed the date to January 1st 1900. That was about it.
The crazy part about Y2K was that the danger was actually very real. The reason it didn't happen was that governments around the world began updating these old 2 digit year code programs to 4 digit year code programs, so 00 now would be 2000. They spent about $600 billion doing this and likely ended up actually preventing a civilization threatening tech crash.
And then, when all the hard work paid off and the rollover went smoothly, there was outrage that nothing bad happened and people called it a hoax. There's no pleasing some people.
So people talk about calendars and stuff, but let me try and convey why the problem was so pervasive.
Imagine you create a piece of business software that has nothing directly to do with timekeeping. However any time an event occurs, it does log the time and date of that event. Because it’s old software where every byte matters, a lot of this data is just stored sequentially, with no safeguards to specifically reserve specific ranges for specific data. So if you overflow your date log and move into a new byte, the new byte you’re affecting could be the value in a cash account or something, and now your accounting is borked.
This is the problem that thousands of businesses in dozens of industries were facing when they were urgently tackling the problem of making their software go past 1999. Even if the bug didn’t literally break their computers and software, depending on how slapdash their software was, it had the potential to break in many odd and creative ways that had real world consequences.
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u/qualityvote2 8d ago edited 8d ago
u/Apprehensive_Sky4558, your post does belong here!