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17th May '13 6:53:56 PM pittsburghmuggle

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Changed line(s) 108 (click to see context) from:

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17th May '13 6:53:13 PM pittsburghmuggle

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Added line(s) 107 (click to see context) :

17th May '13 6:47:38 PM pittsburghmuggle

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Added line(s) 61 (click to see context) :

17th May '13 3:56:05 PM Zagen30

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Changed line(s) 9,10 (click to see context) from:

What had happened was, computer memory and disk space was extremely expensive. By comparison, today, a gigabyte of RAM (roughly 1.4 million kilobytes) for your computer is maybe 50 bucks and a two terabyte (about 20,000 times 100 megabytes) hard drive, (about the size of two packs of playing cards) might be $250 or less. But go back to 1970 and one kilobyte of RAM is about a thousand dollars, a 100 megabyte hard drive (about the size of a dishwasher) might cost $12,000 and replacement disk packs (a foot high and the circumference of a dinner plate) are around $800. So they needed to find ways to use less internal RAM and less disk space in storing information on a computer. One way to save money was to store dates in a short form. So, typically all dates were stored internally as 6 digits (and punctuation was added at display time), so November 27, 1960 was coded as 112760. Now, a month later you can get by adding 1 to the first two digits. The new date is later than the original one. Now, however, say you have a date of February 15, 1992 (111592) and you add eight years to it, you get 111500, which, if the program wasn't prepared for it, would consider it not 11/15/2000, but ''11/15/1900''. Either the difference between the two is a negative amount, or instead of eight years difference being computed, 92 years are computed. The issue here might have been, if you bought something and charged it to your credit card on the last week of 1999, and your bill came in a month later, you get billed for 99 years of compound interest at 21%!

to:

What had happened was, computer memory and disk space was extremely expensive. By comparison, today, a gigabyte of RAM (roughly 1.4 million kilobytes) for your computer is maybe 15 bucks and a two terabyte (about 20,000 times 100 megabytes) hard drive (about the size of two packs of playing cards) might be $100 or less. But go back to 1970 and one kilobyte of RAM is about a thousand dollars, a 100 megabyte hard drive (about the size of a dishwasher) might cost $12,000 and replacement disk packs (a foot high and the circumference of a dinner plate) are around $800. So they needed to find ways to use less internal RAM and less disk space in storing information on a computer. One way to save money was to store dates in a short form. So, typically all dates were stored internally as 6 digits (and punctuation was added at display time), so November 27, 1960 was coded as 112760. Now, a month later you can get by adding 1 to the first two digits. The new date is later than the original one. Now, however, say you have a date of February 15, 1992 (111592) and you add eight years to it, you get 111500, which, if the program wasn't prepared for it, would consider it not 11/15/2000, but ''11/15/1900''. Either the difference between the two is a negative amount, or instead of eight years difference being computed, 92 years are computed. The issue here might have been, if you bought something and charged it to your credit card on the last week of 1999, and your bill came in a month later, you get billed for 99 years of compound interest at 21%!

16th May '13 9:47:21 PM PyroWildcat

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Added line(s) 93 (click to see context) :

27th Apr '13 5:03:57 PM Whitecroc

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Removed due to Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, but it seems risky to leave it out in the open like that.

Deleted line(s) 103,104 (click to see context) :

8th Apr '13 7:33:47 PM AyalaofBorg

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Added line(s) 103 (click to see context) :

7th Apr '13 9:17:48 AM Generalcamo

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