It was also the physical size of the dataset.
On 2020-04-22 12:55, Gibney, Dave wrote:
In the 80's a byte of DASD savings could be thousands of dollars.
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On
Behalf Of Phil Smith III
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 9:12 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Here we go again;
As others have suggested, many companies do still have SSNs stored as
packed decimal. So sure, a namespace expansion is possible, but it's a bigger
change than one might think, however it's done. I've even seen at least one
company who stored them as binary! I sure hope someone got a big bonus
for saving that byte...
Peter Farley wrote:
There are also many non-human entities like corporations that use the
same SSN value space.
There are a LOT of those . . . and they spring up and fade away at a rate far
higher than human births and deaths.
They use the same namespace--that is, if your SSN is 123-45-6789, an estate
or business could also have that number. Since they're uses for different
things, it's more that they happened (!) to choose the same format than that
they're "the same". (And actually they're theoretically formatted differently:
an EIN is xx-xxxxxxx vs. the SSN xxx-xx-xxxx, not that most folks store them
with the hyphens.)
...phsiii
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