> Because if there is someone here, will definitely know that the
> predicted life of such device is below 7 years. Rarely such equipments
> are still in life after 10 years.
It's not so much the equipment as the software, file formats, protocols 
abi's etc. Those things often long outlive the machines they run on.

The definition of standard types like time_t cannot be changed without 
causing an abi break. abi breaks are an extremely big deal.

Most if not all 64 bit operating systems when running native 64 bit apps 
use a 64 bit time_t but they also support 32 bit apps which still use a 
32 time_t and many programmers use int where they should use time_t (int 
is still 32 bit on many 64 bit systems including x64 linux and windows)

And then there are all the arm/coldfire/etc chips running a unix like 
operating system. I don't see microcontrollers going 64 bit in the 
forseeable future (admittedly 30 years is a long time but think how many 
8 bit microcontrollers are still in use today).

And then there is the issue of file formats. If there are only four 
bytes in the file format and you need to be able to represent dates 
before the epoch you are kind of screwed.

I guess many of us on this list today will be the old retired or about 
to retire coders who still know C and are called on to fix the bugs in 
the years running up to 2038.
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