At 02:58 AM 1/5/99 -0000, Eric Smith wrote:
>
>Once databases started being kept on disk drives, saving two bytes for each
>date may not have sounded like much, but it literally did save money. It
>takes fewer disk packs (and perhaps fewer drives) to store 92-byte records
>than 94-byte records. I don't know how many decisions were made on that
>basis, but you can't realistically ignore it.
There's a dozen lame excuses as to why They Did It That Way. Few of
them make any sense. If they'd stored the year in a seven or eight
bits offset from their earliest year, instead of two ASCII or BCD
digits, they'd halve their storage requirements. There is a good
discussion of this at <
http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html>.
At 04:37 PM 1/4/99 -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
>I attended a talk by a Y2K consultant (Bruce Webster)
I remember him from a decade ago, writing for Byte, and doing something
(games?) with the Amiga. I seem to remember him at the Amiga dev cons
where I once met you, too. His resume at <
http://www.bfwa.com/prof/> shows
he's been busy at other things, and has certainly been around for a while
in the world of computers. However, I'll always remain a bit skeptical
of opinions from anyone who's routinely paid to speak or write their
opinions. :-)
Your discussion of being FreeGate's Y2K rep reminded me of when I was
asked whether the software I developed was susceptible. At first
I thought "no way, not a thing." Then I remembered the node-locking
on the SGI version - nope, it wisely used an offset from 1900 and
stored it in enough bits. A few sprintf("%s") of ctime(), though.
- John
Received on Tue Jan 05 1999 - 10:01:13 GMT