Duane Percox writes:

>And what about the "rumor" that the SSN (USA) being expanded from 9 to
>10 digits?
>
>Reminds me of a system I was involved in many many years ago. It was on
>a DEC PDP-11 (RSTS/E) and encoded phone numbers using the fact that
>the middle digit of the area code was always a 0 or 1.

Many of these stupid-looking decisions were the right ones, given the
information available at the time. When the IBM PC first came out, around
1982, storage prices were about $200/megabyte, and there were real limits
to how many megabytes the machines of the time could address. A lot of
engineering work went into making it possible to do some of these things
at all, never mind with how much future flexibility. Remember when a
program that required ;MAXDATA=31232 was considered a design failure?

Today, when lots of people buy 300MHz, 32MB home computers just to play
games and write homework assignments, it may be difficult to understand
the limitations that software engineers faced 30 years ago.

-- Bruce


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