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BAR

wrote:
On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:51:14 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

When these mainframe apps were designed, conservation of precious disk
space, fast I/O and frugal CPU time was more important than thinking
20 years in the future.

Actually I am old enough to remember when 80 characters was the limit
and dates had 1 digit "years". Those folks seemed to handle the decade
change OK ... many times. That was a regular thing when "media" was a
card. IBM used a 5 digit date on lots of transactions until 1970 or
so.

Back then a byte had a very high cost. It was in the millions of dollars
for a accounting system.