The Mac is like a modern day Betamax 1730

Brian Inglis

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worked at a place in the 1970's where all dates were kept in two bytes (5 bits for day, 4 for month - good for 15 or 16-month years and 7 bits for the year). calendar started in 1970 so it was good until 2027 or 2028.

very conservative company - they hired me back in the mid-1980's when they turfed everything (brought in CMS version of Model204, of all things), so they never had the year 2000 panic. but plenty of other panics. actually their reason was more visceral, had to do with their consulting rates which had far exceeded the original systems' expectations. two-byte packed decimal with one decimal position but $99.90 per hour limit required them to ledger each bit of work multiple times which i think their clients found rather suspicious.

well, i guess they also wanted to get rid of all that BAL code. nobody seemed to think much of my idea of just dropping the decimal point or the sign bits.

new system's response time was order of magnitude slower than promised, up to 2 minutes for each line entry in a consultant's weekly timesheet. so i made a new SLA that dropped all reference to 'response time' and replaced it with 'turnaround time' - 20 minutes for a whole timesheet! everybody calmed down - not the first time political approach exceeded my technical ability.

my first experience with big-team 'rapid development'. took another year to excise all the 'table sweeps' from the application, but the way they charged their customers, they didn't seem all that upset that they were paying so much dough to other consultants. once, the senior partner ostensibly overseeing us was yet again befuddled by technical gobbledegook. his question made everything suddenly very clear - "is this a problem that can be solved with money?".

pc