I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show jim rozen
wrote back on 17 Feb 2005 10:20:58 -0800 in
rec.crafts.metalworking :
In article , Gunner says...

So you are claiming that the issue was intentionally caused by
programmers 5-15 yrs prior?

Well actually it was. "Back when I was a boy" (or as my daughter
says 'back when dinosaurs roamed the earth...') every bit of
memory cost. Figure all those data files had a date in there, if
you could save 32 bits somehow in each one, that adds up after
a while.

Hence the XX year format rather than XXXX.

But honestly I figure they just wanted to see that they'd
have jobs right around the year 1999.

Screw that. Most of them thought "2000" was like, way, way in the
future. Heck, they thought 1980 was a long way off.
I'm sure a number of them said to themselves "Better software will be
written before this becomes a problem".

Heck, I'd wager a bunch of them didn't even think about the issue, not
even in 1998, long after they were gone from the company. I doubt there
were any programmers who sat up in bed in the middle of the night and said
"Oh Alan Turing, I forgot to allow for the millennium change when I kludge
that program at Old Last Bank in '68!"

Crumbs! Some of the "great legends" of computer science revolve around
writing programs to take advantage of the hardware to maximize program
processing speed. "Life was tough in those days, we had hard wire the
program by hand. Crimped the wires with our teeth, we did! Didn't think
nothing of doing it with the power still on!" [and then the asteroid hit,
and I am the last of our kind ...]

tschus
pyotr

--
pyotr filipivich
We didn't have these sorts of problems when I was a boy,
back when snakes wore shoes and dirt was $2 a pound,
if you could find it. We had to make our own from rocks!