A stark warning about the upcoming Epochalypse, also known as the "Year 2038 problem," has come from the past, as National Museum Of Computing system restorers have discovered an unsetting issue while working on ancient systems.

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Robin Downs, a volunteer who was recently involved in an exhibition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gear at the museum, was on hand to demonstrate the problem to The Register in the museum's Large Systems Gallery, which now houses a running PDP-11/73.

The machine's software had already been patched for the Y2K problem, where using two digits to store the year caused headaches when the century rolled around. "Y2K", Downs explained, "was mainly an application programming

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