I am on an email list for Time Nuts - people who are fanatically obsessed intellectually curious about accurate time-keeping. It seems that a number of older high-end GPS receivers are reporting that they are now operating in the year 1995.
It seems that the people who wrote the code for these particular units never realized that their units would still be operating twenty years later so they encoded the date function as an integer counting up from week one of GPS origin and allowed for only 1024 possible weeks. Well guess what - week 1025 has been reached and the counter has rolled over back to the starting position in 1995.
GPS is great for finding your position on the planet but it is not as well known that they can serve as a very accurate clock and provide timing functions - some of these units are in large astronomical observatories
Needless to say, the programming staff has long since been disbanded, the parent company has zero desire to support a 20-year old product but will not release the source code. There is a deep rumbling of consternation running through the Time Nuts world...
