Eric Sink has an interesting piece about MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare. The basic idea is that one way of categorising software is by who uses it:

• MeWare: only the developer
• UsWare: the developer, among others
• ThemWare: people other than the developer

I think most programmers can see what Eric’s getting at there. If you’ve ever worked on, say, a piece of software used exclusively by people in a different department of the company you work for, you know how hard it can be to ensure that the software actually meets those people’s needs.

However, I took issue with one particular thing Eric says.

In the context of a discussion about the Y2.038K problem, Craig Berry surmised that the 32-bit Unix time_t type originated on 16-bit machines. That’s entirely true; for those with too much time on their hands, here’s a short history of Unix time handling.