On Tue, 25 Apr 2000 20:07:05 +0200, Anthony Atkielski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> I dunno. I don't think that adding two more digits in the 1960s to year
> fields would have really made any problems too hard. It was more a question
You never had to fit 2 more bytes onto a punch card, did you?
I'm not being facetious here - you had 80 columns and that was IT.
Some databases were laid out with (for instance) exactly 3 6144-byte
records per physical track on the disk. Adding 2 more digits would have
dropped it to 2 per track, with a lot of wasted space - and forcing not
only the consumption of 50% more disk, but also re-doing any indexing (see
below for a related story).
> of people wanting to do things the easy way. And you can't say that it was
> a technological barrier, because they were still making Y2K-related mistakes
> into the 1980s and beyond.
When I got to VT in 1989, chargeback accounts on the IBM mainframe
were of the form 'nxxxy'. n was a 0-9 type code, and xxx was a 3-digit
hex number and y was a single digit 0-7. Turns out that the xxx and y
were the track humber and record number when the database lived on an
IBM3330 disk drive. The database had since been moved to 3350, and
then to 3380/3390. However, it proved to be just too much of a
challenge to track down ALL the places those numbers were used and fix
them. Not only does the database itself need to be redone, but you
get to re-do all the userids to give them the new numbers, find ALL
the JCL that has chargeback accounting information, fix all the files
on secretary's PCs that have a professor-to-account lists.. the list
goes on and on....
And we're a relatively small shop - our machine room is only 10K sqare feet..
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech
