re: #149 Hecuba’s daughter

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.

iirc storing a full date with a 2 digit year took 6 bytes (yymmdd) or whatever

storing a julian integer a) took less and b) didnt have any limitations or cutoffs (y2k), at least for financial and integrated accounting purposes (ie that didnt have to go back further than say 1800 or in the future more than 500 years)

p.s. i havent programmed in years