On Wed, 14 Aug 2019 17:21:06 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >There were other options to reduce the storage requirement of a date, e.g., >store them in binary. > In some cases, dates have been stored in two-byte signed decimal, biased by -1900, supporting dates through 2899 with minimal code change.
>________________________________________ >From: Jesse 1 Robinson >Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2019 12:10 PM > >-- Can't cite attribution, but I remember the calculation that despite our >late 1990s poignant misery, the ancient choice to represent dates with two >digits was actually economically correct. The burdensome cost of both media >and memory storage in, say, 1970, outweighed on balance the eventual cost of >remediation. It's easy to ask what difference two bytes would have made, but >the hard-money cost of billions and billions of 'extra' bytes would have been >substantial. > Me, too. However I doubt that many organizations invested those savings in reliable securities to be redeemed for the eventual cost of remediation. In the mid 80s, I suggested that a product we were designing store 4-digit years in anticipation of Y2K. Overruled by manager: o No then available OS interface reported 4-digit years. o No need; who cares?! -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
