5 Jan
1999
5 Jan
'99
5:10 a.m.
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
There's a dozen lame excuses as to why They Did It
That Way. Few of
them make any sense. If they'd stored the year in a seven or eight
bits offset from their earliest year, instead of two ASCII or BCD
digits, they'd halve their storage requirements. There is a good
discussion of this at <http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html>.
I'd love to see code to do this for an IBM business computer of the
late 50s or early 60s. I.e., IBM 702, 705, 705-III, 1401, 1410, 7010, 7070,
7080 or even the 650.
AFAIK, *NONE* of those machines had the capability of storing a binary
number into a character of memory. I suppose it might have been possible
to wedge a six-bit number into a character, but it would probably have
required a 64-character lookup table to encode (not too bad), and a loop to
decode (horribly inefficient).
I think it is necessary to understand a bit more about what was actually going
on at the time, rather than just reasoning that since modern computers are
good at storing binary integers, the programmers in the 50s and early 60s
must have been idiots.
Eric