On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:34:32 -0400, BAR wrote:

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.

Yeah, at Y2K a lot of these systems designed when space and CPU
minutes were gold were still running.
Even when I first started coding in 1980 my boss got on me for letting
the compiler find my syntax errors and typos.
Said I should do more desk checking.
A minute of CPU time was worth more than 2 hours of mine.
That changed drastically pretty soon.
As late as 1995 when I was contracting at McDonald's corporate,
disk space was still tightly held.
Shortly after starting there I grabbed a couple hundred cylinders
to do some work and got a call from data management not to do it
without a request. Hadn't seen that in years.
Later that day out front for a smoke, I was introduced to the DM
manager, who when he heard my name, said something like
"Oh yeah, Vic. The guy who grabbed all my extra space."
He smiled when he said it.
I told him I had twice that on my hard drive at home.
He said, "Bring it in."
Still smiling, but barely. I'd never want his job, catching it on one
end by users wanting space, and the other end with budget constraints.

--Vic