OS/8 dates (was TECO ^B on OS/8 and RT-11)

What seems even more evident to me is that DEC took (as most other companies did as well) the attitude that even the internal representation of date and time was not important enough to allow the same information to be exchanged between operating systems on a consistent basis. It would seem that OS/8 supported dates starting with 1970. RT-11 supported dates starting with 1972 - although initial versions would not recognize dates until 1973. RSX-11 supported dates starting with 1900 (or 1901). I don't know about RSTS/E. VMS was somewhat better since I think it begins in the 1800's I think that DOS started in 1980 as one other dumb example. It would have taken ONLY a doubling of the date and time internal representation to start with to support dates starting at least in 1582 when the Common Era (aka Gregorian) Calendar has its base. That would have allowed most dates prior to any current event to be noted using the same internal standard. For OS/8, that would probably have required two 12 bit words rather than one - with perhaps one word alone used for the year to provide a range of 4096 years and probably many more years if the other word with the months and days (or number of days in a year) held some bits for a larger year range. The date and time software would have never broken at Y2K since the software would have been able to manage the first 400 years cycle successfully (1582 to 1982) for which there is an exact multiple of everything since there are only 97 leap years over a 400 year period (1700, 1800 and 1900 are NOT leap years - a century year must be divisible by 400 to be a leap year) giving a total of 146097 days in 400 years which is exactly 20871 weeks. By allowing incompatible data within different operating systems, DEC management, in Ken Olsen and the board, displayed an astonishing lack of foresight, at least in my opinion. So when the observation is made that a specific operating system (or even just a program) was broken, it seems that the source of the problem was upper management, not the programmers. Otherwise, the same broken software would not have existed across all of the operating systems across all of the companies. But all of that is history now or is it? Jerome Fine