Make fun of Apple’s Newton MessagePad all you want, but the proto-PDA introduced by Apple in the late 90s managed to gather some rather tenacious followers. Current users of the then-revolutionary, now-exceedingly-bulky personal digital assistants were afraid that a date handling bug would render the devices useless beginning early next year. However, fear no more: a developer has come to the rescue with a patch for the Newton’s OS that lets the device handle dates in 2010 and beyond.

The problem is similar to the dreaded Y2K problem that many computers faced in the late 90s (we’ll take this chance to gloat that Macs never had this problem). Dates were essentially encoded using only the last two digits of the year, so computers would start reporting the year as 1900 instead of 2000 after New Year’s Eve, 1999. While the impending implosion of life as we knew it never happened, lots of time and money went in to fixing the problem so that our increasingly computer-controlled life would continue without fail.

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