9 Feb
2010
9 Feb
'10
3:50 p.m.
From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 3:07 PM
On 9 Feb 2010 at 14:55, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
> Of course, these are the people who argued as to
how many digits you
> really need to represent a year on the modern calendar. Hint: 2
> digits only takes you so far... ;-)
100 years, which is longer than we've had
electronic digital
computers--or longer, depending on the mechanism used to store the
field (i.e.,. BCD vs. binary vs. ASCII). An awful lot of legacy code
was changed by Y2K programmers to express the year as a 4 digit
field, instead of simply employing "wraparound" logic. But heck, at
$45/hour for a COBOL programmer back then, why not make the job more
complicated?
In those industries in which there is a lot of legacy COBOL code (which
is to say, those industries most affected by the so-called "Y2K bug"),
wraparound on dates is not a particularly good idea. I note the little
old lady in the UK who got a letter from her insurance company expressing
congratulations over the arrival of her new baby girl: A wrap-around
year calculation had turned the 101 year old woman into an infant.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I earned my living doing
COBOL and PL/I programming for a major university's financial systems,
I frequently argued with my colleagues about the continued idiocy (no, I
was not politic about it) of using 2-digit years with the turn of the
century only 20 years away. When challenged on it, I could point to my
office mate, one of whose on-going tasks was documenting the major part
of the university's general accounting application which was written in
uncommented 1401 Autocoder, and which ran under emulation on the Amdahl
470 V8, that dated back to 1959. The assistant manager of the FS group
was one of the two people (the other one still in the Comptroller's office)
who wrote the code, 20 years earlier.
*He* backed me up.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/