A lot of earlier digital timepieces come with arbitrary date range limits and I have always wondered what is the reason behind such limitations.

For example, a lot of camera date backs (used to physically embed time and date on film) could not be set to any date post a certain year, most commonly 2020 but I’ve also seen 2019 and 2029 as cutoffs. Even models that has a 4 digit year format isn’t immune from this issue, and sometimes it’s possible to bypass it by setting the date to Dec 31 2020, let the it roll over naturally to Jan 1 2021 and you will then be free to fast forward the date.

Maybe it’s similar to the YEAR 10000 bug on modern Windows OS where many internal variables could overflow beyond a certain datum so it would make sense to prevent it in the front end.