5 Jan
1999
5 Jan
'99
4:11 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. :-)
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. The gist of it was to refute the author's assertion
that "they couldn't have
done it to save two bytes." Look at the design of an IBM 1401 sometime.
It has BCD-oriented memory.
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,
punched cards, and lack of code memory and processing time for
performing input validation, and the reticent nature of programmers
who didn't want to be blamed for errors resulting from updating
data or code as machines improved and data migrated.
As you said, though, you'd be surprised what ancient computers can do.
I'd hate to say something was impossible; I'll happily admit that a Y2K
problem arose because at the time it seemed the most sensible way to do it.
- John