re: #139 Dangerman (misuser of the sarc tag)

Should have gone to Julian date representation

In the beginning, the problem was system limits, such as a maximum of 4096 for record length. So earlier programmers were forced to use 2 digit years. But when you have millions of lines of code written by people who have long left the firm, updating this code without introducing new errors was a herculean task that took years. My sister worked with someone who was one of these cowboys — fastest programmer she knew. Unfortunately, it was spaghetti-code so that no one else was able to decipher what he had done and so subtle errors crept in that often wouldn’t emerge until months or even years later.