[Info-vax] Clustering on VMS 4.7

[Richard B. Gilbert]

P. Sture wrote:
> In article <Gqednfc7-dK21XTUnZ2dnUVZ_hGdnZ2d at giganews.com>,
>  "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> The Y2K problem, AIRC, was that software that originated in the years 
>> 1955-1999 frequently wrote dates such as 4/17/09 and, with the 
>> millinium, this became ambiguous!  Did it mean 4/17/1909 or 4/17/2009? 
>> As early as 1975, people realized that this would become a problem.  Of 
>> course nobody did anything about it until late 1999 when everyone panicked!
> 
> The other aspects were screen and printout real estate, not to mention 
> disk space. In the 1970s / early 1980s we never thought that those 
> applications would still be running twenty years later (and many 
> weren't); lack of portability meant that a new platform meant a rewrite 
> anyway.
> 

A good deal of the problem dated back to the 1950's and the 80 column 
punched card!  Space was REALLY at a premium and a two digit year field 
did not pose ambiguity problems.  The punched cards disappeared but the 
existing software had punched cards in its ancestry!

Does anyone recall the story of the IBM 360 emulating the IBM 7090 
emulating the CPC (card programmed computer)?  The people who programmed 
the CPC were long gone and, needless to say, there was no documentation 
to tell anyone how the CPC program worked.

I'm too young (Hah!) to have worked with the CPC, the sorters and the 
collators but I did see them in use ca. 1958 while I was still in High 
School.