what year came before 1 CE (aka AD 1)?

Question

Was the year before that 0 CE or 1 BCE?

This is a meta-programming question, relating to the religious wars over the first number in a list. Should it be 0 or 1?

Some points to consider:

• What would Richard Stallman say? I read an article by him recently where he got upset that the OLPC is offering Windows. He listed the reasons this is bad. The list was numbered, starting with 0.
• How would they have handled the year 10 problem (Y1), when suddenly computers had to double the number of bits stored per year?
• How would Joel have handled this, considering that when he proposed a new version of dates for the excel macro language, he took into account that the date IDs would be wrong for dates in January and Febrauary, 1900? (See here: My First BillG Review)

Edit: The Wikipedia entry quoted by @Svelil below says there was no year 0 CE, just for the record. We went straight from 1 BCE to 1 CE.

Answer 1

Was the year before that 0 CE or 1 BCE?

1 BCE, though it wasn't called so before that time.

How would they have handled the year 10 problem (Y1), when suddenly computers had to double the number of bits stored per year?

Right, they ran out of fingers.

In fact, Y2k was not the first date problem.

When Caesar died and left no records on how to use Julian calendar, Octavian applied leap year once in three years, not four. They noticed that in 9 BC and there were no leap years until 8 AD to correct the difference.

Answer 2

Should it be 0 or 1?

Wikipedia has a nice article about this: Year Zero
As starting list-counts at zero is pretty common in programming, I would personally adhere to that standard.

How would they have handled the year 10 problem?

Use your feet :-) (Hey, it actually doubles your ability to count)

Answer 3

As the MAD Book About World History said:

1 BCE. The world's greatest historians can't agree what to call the next year.

Answer 4

I don't understand the confusion. I was pretty sure it goes ... 1 BCE, 0 BCE, 0 AD, 1 AD ...