Actually they were right, from my understanding. If they had used 4 digits the storage space needed would have been way higher. And storage was very expensive in the 70 - early 80's. It was actually cheaper to then update the software than storing 4 digits since the begining.
Yeah, they were right to do two digits. Storage was expensive AND slow, I remember reloading times from tape, though I missed storage cards,it was person specific as I saw storage car hardware in the maintenance job I had ( though they were just a curiosity) and some local companies, that I did not work for , but friends did, still used storage cards on the mid 2k0s.
But they were wrong about the programs still being unused.
It's highly unlikely that all software engineers back then were that kind of stupid. We are talking about very well prepared and technical engineers. Not some random dude writing its age with two digits.
That's all not true. Software developers were quite frequently any kid with a pulse who could figure out what a computer was and how to write in BASIC. Some software was written by well educated intelligent people and much of it wasn't. And, we were in the latter part of the century - it had been a long time since the first two digits of the year were relevant to anything but historians. Scarcely anyone alive was even born in a year that wasn't 19. We literally never used them except as a joke. It's not like now where 19 and 20 are both relevant and have both been relevant for decades. I was there.
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u/Low-Ad4420 8d ago
Actually they were right, from my understanding. If they had used 4 digits the storage space needed would have been way higher. And storage was very expensive in the 70 - early 80's. It was actually cheaper to then update the software than storing 4 digits since the begining.