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RE: Causes
By masher2 (blog) on 4/14/2008 12:54:27 PM , Rating: 4

Most systems stored date values as a single unit (e.g. a certain number of seconds past a given date), not as its separate components of years, months, and days. This simplifies date arithmetic, but requires the value to be converted for textual display on the screen or for user input.

That's where most of the problems arose, as those "packing and unpacking" routines assumed a two-digit textual century. A value input as Jan 1, 2000 would be interpreted as Jan 1, 1900...and a system-generated value for the year 2000 would, once displayed on the screen then reparsed, be 'clipped' to the previous century.

Additionally, there were some primitive systems that stored dates as the actual text values, rather than any numeric form. These of course were space-limited within the data representation itself.


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