picstart wrote:Reminds me of the year 2000 problem. An extra two bytes for dates would have saved millions of dollars but coders actually believed saving bytes was more important
Y2K actually stems from the 1960's and 1970's when computer memory was extremely expensive and losing the "Useless" two extra characters (=14 or 16 holes) in every date from punch cards also made more room for more important data.
Remember that the first computers were only meant to compute things (hence their name) and not to actually store data.
Programmers at that time could never have thought we would still use their work (and its data) at this day and age.
(Depending on your age: would you have believed, when you were young, that in 2018 we all could carry portable computers that would give us access to the entire world?)
I'm not defending the programmers from old times, just trying to put everything in perspective.