Paul Christensen writes:

>>> Paul Christensen <[log in to unmask]> 11/13/97 06:26am
>>>
I was on a contract in 1979 where we were fixing an application that
only had a
1 digit year.
I didn't realize that many others had ever done such a thing.

At the time I thought a 1 digit year was short sighted, but I never
considered
going to 4.
In fact science fiction books about 1984 still seemed far off in the future!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around the same time in 1980, we had some one digit years that had to
be taken care of plus another similar problem.  We were getting 711 run
time errors for some Cobol applications.  These errors indicate that a
numeric operation was being attempted on non-numeric data.  The
problem was that it was only happening in November and  December.
By the time someone was assigned to check it out, the errors stopped
happening.  This continued for two years.  As you may have guessed, it
turned out that the programmer to really save disc space used a one
character month in a date.  For November he used an "N" and a "D" for
December.  A zero was used for October.  By the time we got to looking
at the code, the month was "1" for January, and everything looked ok.

Mike Berkowitz
Guess? Inc.