ascii dates (was: sick and fucking tired of this Y2k shit)

["Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" <VW@i405.com>]

This idea sucks.  It wasn't good programming to store dates in 2 bytes
instead of 4.

You are suggesting that it was GOOD PROGRAMMING to store years as ASCII or
EBC** values instead of encoding them in binary?  That back then when a bit
was a lot, that they didn't understand how to use bits?

Last time I checked, you can store 256 values in a single byte.  You don't
need to store then as two ASCII values of digits.

It is poorly trained programmers and the general infancy of the industry
that lead to this.  Their weren't standards for databases (such as SQL) and
it was norm for anyone.

And I also don't agree that an old program being used 30 years later is
evidence of quality.  There are still a lot of users running Windows 3.1
from Microsoft, does that mean it was a good Operating System?  I say that
it is more to do with saving $ and lack of understanding the cost of sitting
still vs. the cost of re-working a system.

People don't like change, new industries don't have rules and standards.
When things go wrong -- we learn the hard lessons.

Study history -- when gas and oil were first discovered, radioactive
materials, mining underground for coal -- there were always major disasters
and mistakes that lead to learning Hard Lessons(tm).  That is how we humans
do it.




-----Original Message-----
From: dana@dtn.com [mailto:dana@dtn.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 1999 12:30 PM
To: Sunder; The@reject.kewlhair.com; cypherpunks@toad.com
Cc: The@reject.kewlhair.com; cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: sick and fucking tired of this Y2k shit


Ehem.  Nice try, but it was caused by 2k computers, 10M harddrives (or no
harddrive), and the other assorted antique hardware that was once
high-tech.  I am sick of hearing how "Bad programmers" caused this "Bug".
It is not a bug, it is a feature that was practically required on older
hardware.  In fact I would bet that over the course of the last 30 odd
years the savings from using 2 digit years would easily pay for this
"crisis".  Here is an example for you:

Some Insurance Company Inc has a database of customer records.  This
database contains the date in 4 fields; Date of Birth, Start of Policy, End
of Policy, and Last transaction date.  By only using 2 digit dates you are
able save 64 bits per record.  Not much, but when the company has
100,000,000 customers/records this works out to 700M+.  Now in the late
80's I bought a 40M scsi harddrive and it cost me $900.  With this as a
base price storing those extra letters would have cost an extra $15,000 or
so (probably more).

Now I know my example is kinda weak, but the same was done throughout the
computer industry.  Maybe you started out on Windows 95 on a Pentium, but
there was ALOT of computing going on before MS even opened it's doors.  It
used to be that, particularly in DB systems, data items had a "Normal"
size, a rather small normal size.  I can't recall  what they were now, but
they were like 8 char for first name, 12 char last name, etc.  While these
seem silly now, they were once rather important.

You really need to keep in mind:

Paper tape
Punched cards
8" floppys
<100M harddrives
Nine and sixteen track tape
Floppy jukeboxs
etc.