IP: Y2K and the past

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

As a person who took the "short cuts" on date calculations in the 60s, it is worth putting in place the scene for those 
who were not there. Our machines at Bell Labs , the world leader in comm and cs research at that time, were 32 Kilo 
word 704s with maybe 8 K given to the BESYS operating system and one instruction per word wild in optimization -- 
Fortran mainly and the machines were limited in character handling (one machines in the commercial arena became 
somewhat better latter on). Many places could not afford 32 K of memory and used less.

In that world, programs that saved a few bytes (6 to the word) seemed wise and good practice. Many of those programs 
due to secondary storage (read tape) compatibility issues and desire just to re-compile when switching generation of 
machines carried over this problem. into 360s and beyond.

I cannot ever remember worrying about the year 2000. It was out of mind as we struggled to get programs running and 
tried to keep up with the evolution of OS and language changes that flew at us.

Sorry people

Dave
_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber