Re: I'm having a vague flashback here...
Trainee me, circa 1979: "Shouldn't we be storing the century part of the date here?"
Chief programmer, struggling to be heard over the laughter: "We won't be running these Cobol programs at the end of the century, silly boy!"
Chief programmer was right, at least from a Bayesian reasoner's point of view. There was a high probability that any given piece of code wouldn't still be in use in 20 years. And for what was, the savings of using 2-digit years was very likely greater than cost of remediation (once adjusted for inflation, etc). Factor in the widespread economic benefits of the capital spending and productivity boost that Y2K remediation is broadly credited with (among people who've actually studied it with some degree of rigor), and it was with high probability the better decision.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
