The Two Digit Bandit is the great idea that saved us millions of
bytes of storage in the old days (or hay days) of computing.
When you really think about it, this was a great idea. However, the original creators
never really thought that those programs and tactics would survive for another 50 years or
more. Crossing over to a time when those extra two digits would really count.
Who could have even imagined that people would be leaving past the 99 year mark on a
regular basis. They certainly did not expect to. But, now that they have also reached that
golden age and are crossing the barrier of the Two Digit Bandit, they are
also thinking about that marvelous piece of code or hardware ingenuity that saved the
giants millions of kilobytes. Not to mention the associated cost effectiveness of
the scheme.
The Two Digit Bandit is a technique for saving memory and cutting
hardware costs. Every knows that we are, where, in the 20th Century. And by the same
token, that we are in the Western century year 1900. This means that you really do
not need to save the year's date as 1999, you can save it as the two digits 99, and only
add the 19 when someone asks for a printout.
This may not sound like a great savings to you. But, the caveat is this. Your insurance
company, the IRS, and Social Security offices have millions of records with dates of this
type. And 50 years ago millions of anything was a lot of stuff (or data in non-technical
terms.). when complete operating systems were written in and running on machines with a
whopping 64 thousand bytes of memory, those two digits meant a lot of storage. And think
of the time to actually process those extra digits. They did not even have those old
fashion 286 PCs that are sitting in many a corner of corporate America and my lab where I
am writing this from.
So the Two Digit Bandit came to our rescue and took away the need to
store all those 19s in those tiny computers. It wrapped around ages at 99, because no one
lived that long except on the Isle of Crete as far as those programmers and engineers were
concerned.
Besides, you could always come up with something for those exceptions. For example, you
could force the field to zeros and then know that you need to branch to another routine
for this odd ball that needed to go beyond 99.
Now the Two Digit Bandit has a new wrinkle for you. You can no longer
say that 00 in your fields are invalid. You can not even invoke that
magic routine for those few intrepid individuals who decided to move to Crete and live
beyond 99 years.
Why?
Because people are being born in the year 2000, and the Two
Digit Bandit says that 00 is the year 1900 not the year 2000.
Just think of all those children around the world who will be born 100 years old on
January 1, 2000. They will be able to collect Social Security, if it still exists as we
know it today, before they even need to go to preschool or the potty by themselves.
The miracles of the electronic and computer age are here. Neither the two should ever
be confused.
