Mac SCI would attempt to use the date to determine how long a delay should last by getting the current time in seconds since 1 January 1904, the Macintosh epoch, and dividing by 12 hours. An issue in the Mac version of Sierra's Creative Interpreter (Mac SCI) would cause the game to "lock-up" when attempting to handle a delay due to a problem involving an overflow. Multiple Sierra Entertainment games released for the Classic Mac OS started to freeze when running on 18 September 1993. Values on and after this day do not fit into a signed 16-bit integer, but overflow and return negative values. On 18 September 1989, these programs began to fail, the date being exactly 32,768 (2 15) days since the zero date. Some mainframe programs were written to encode dates as the number of days since a 'zero date' of 1 January 1900, storing them as signed 16-bit binary integers. This was recognized when the later COS-310 operating system was developed, and dates were recorded differently.
The Digital Equipment Corporation OS/8 operating system for the PDP-8 computer used only three bits for the year, representing the years 1970 to 1977. There were numerous problems and crashes related to this bug while an alternative format was developed. On 4 January 1975, the 12-bit field that had been used for dates in the DECsystem-10 operating systems overflowed. The most well-known consequence of bugs of this type is the Y2K problem, but many other milestone dates or times exist that have caused or will cause problems depending on various programming deficiencies. These are most commonly manifestations of arithmetic overflow, but can also be the result of other issues. In computer science, time formatting and storage bugs are a class of software bugs that may cause time and date calculation or display to be improperly handled.
Software errors affecting times and dates
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