5 Jan
1999
5 Jan
'99
5:05 a.m.
At 12:49 PM 1/5/99 -0500, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Tom Christiansen was a college friend of mine; that's exactly the
kind of person he is. :-)
I take no personal offense, but I did get a rather curt blowoff.
There is
a good
discussion of this at <http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html>.
I wrote a response to that very discussion. It was summarily ignored. I'm not expert on the 1401, but I understand what
you're getting at.
I'm sympathetic to the view that two-digit Y2K problems exist because
of constraints of input devices, storage devices, dain-bramaged COBOL...
Another so-far-unmentioned scarce resource: 80 columns of data per card.
Think about it. A customer ID card. If you have a date on it, that's
two less characters of something else, the name, perhaps?
Imagine a metropolitan utility company with 1 million customers. One card
per month per customer. Two megabytes of "19" per month with only one date
per card. That's 800 feet of tape per month per date (at 200 bpi). Handling,
storage, time, money, space. It all adds up. The physical volume of that
amount of data is incomprehensible today when they are sewing digitized
samples containing hundreds of Kbytes into novelty underwear.
-ethan