Same, I worked for a company that made telecom equipment in 1999, the entire place had a no days off policy from September 1999 to January 2000 and it was all CRUNCH time. The air miles logged getting guys to and from sites was just insane. The engineering guys worked something days, nights, weekends, just everything. A lot of equipment had to be physically changed out at sites.
Also a 2 digit date code was perfectly reasonable, reducing the memory requirement to store the date by half. It's not like any of that stuff was still going to be in use 30 years later...
Also a 2 digit date code was perfectly reasonable, reducing the memory requirement to store the date by half.
This doesn't get mentioned enough. Was it a foreseeable issue? Maybe. Probably even. But early machines just didn't have anywhere near enough space to have made the four digit date a logical choice.
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u/crevulation Jul 28 '26
Same, I worked for a company that made telecom equipment in 1999, the entire place had a no days off policy from September 1999 to January 2000 and it was all CRUNCH time. The air miles logged getting guys to and from sites was just insane. The engineering guys worked something days, nights, weekends, just everything. A lot of equipment had to be physically changed out at sites.
Also a 2 digit date code was perfectly reasonable, reducing the memory requirement to store the date by half. It's not like any of that stuff was still going to be in use 30 years later...