And Kubota used 3 digit hour meters because???????

[Camo]

Why in the world did they ever do that on the older tractors? What tractor in normal use won't see over 999 hours? It had to look bad even when new like that was possibly the life expectancy! Now we all know Kubota builds brutally tough tractors that last a long, long time, so what gives?

 

[Evil the Weasel]

So you could feel like you were on a new tractor every 1000 hours? Cars used to have only 5 digits on the odomoter also, but maybe they weren't expected to last that long.

 

[Camo]

I got mine with 640 on it, and was looking at a nice B7200 with 505 on it.......The tractors are built around the mid 80's, and usually have far more hours on them that the gauge says.........

 

[irwin]

The same genius thinking that led to computer programmers using a 2 digit year in the date program.. This by the way allowed programmers to make a lot of money in the late 1990's doing Y2K updates.

 

[Camo]

The same genius thinking that led to computer programmers using a 2 digit year in the date program.. This by the way allowed programmers to make a lot of money in the late 1990's doing Y2K updates.

You bring a very good point there! LOL!

 

[RickB]

Why in the world did they ever do that on the older tractors? What tractor in normal use won't see over 999 hours? It had to look bad even when new like that was possibly the life expectancy! Now we all know Kubota builds brutally tough tractors that last a long, long time, so what gives?

For whatever reason, three digit hour meters were almost the only style found on earlier Asian compact tractors. Not limited to Kubota by any means. Allis Chalmers, Ford, CaseIH and others did the same thing.

 

[RadarTech]

The same genius thinking that led to computer programmers using a 2 digit year in the date program.. This by the way allowed programmers to make a lot of money in the late 1990's doing Y2K updates.

Hey wait a minute.. I was one of those guys doing lots of updates!!! no hard feelings there- it was a job!

That is what took me from Radar Support to Computer Network Engineering.
Although I still consider myself a RADAR tech.

To be fair the reason for the 2 digit year is probrably the same as the hour meter- $$$$$.

Back in the 60's and 70's computer memory was highly expensive.
I worked on a radar in the Marines that had 4K of memory and the big brother that had 64K..

One of the 32K memory drawers weighed over 40 lbs and cost $90K.
Of course part of that was the mil spec for heat.

Now to equate that to an hour meter.. It probrably is in the same boat.
I can see the costing and complexities of a meter with the gears in a minature size. But you would think that the numbers they were buying it would be a wash...maybe not....




whatcha think? valid reasoning?

Later,
J

 

[BXpanded]

The hour meters were intended to be used to schedule maintenance not to reflect the "life" of the tractor. They were (are) so easy to change they have little credibility for that. I've seen several peices of older construction equipment that had 3 digit "Hobbs" meters.

 

[MarkV]

The hour meters were intended to be used to schedule maintenance not to reflect the "life" of the tractor. They were (are) so easy to change they have little credibility for that. I've seen several peices of older construction equipment that had 3 digit "Hobbs" meters.

Yep I agree. Even with the 4 digit meter it has little to do with the real life of the tractor. My 98 Kubota 21 has a mechanical meter that is keyed off of the RPM's. Run it for 10 hours at half throttle and you gain 5 hours. My 05 Kubota L39 has an electric meter. Leave the key on without the tractor running for 10 hours and you gain 10 hours on the meter.

MarkV

 

[Barrys_Toys]

Quote:

The same genius thinking that led to computer programmers using a 2 digit year in the date program.. This by the way allowed programmers to make a lot of money in the late 1990's doing Y2K updates.

​

Back in the 60's and 70's disk drives were sized the hundred thousands of bytes not megabytes or gigabytes they are today. When creating a database of a larger size, we looked for any way to save bytes so it would fit on a drive. This was what caused the problem. Even with 30 megabyte drives, a file with 500,000 records took up a huge amount of the available storage. We did whatever we could to compact the data.

As far as the y2k problem, often times the problem was just to the rest of problems we had to solve.

Y2k was a necessary evil!

Barry