> If you want to store only the year, why not store the years since 1900? That way in a single byte you can go all the way up until 2155.
You're making an assumption in that statement that there's a byte and it's eight bits in length. This was not always true. Punch cards didn't really work that way, and fair number of CPU's didn't either.
Early machines used various decimal systems and 6-bit characters were widespread also. This explains a bit of why the C language and descendants often have native support for Octal literals and Unix permissions are built around three bit groupings.
On a personal note, even in the very early 90's, I also remember using a CDC machine (a descendant of Seymour Cray's 6600) that supported 60-bit words with 6-bit characters. Pressure to move to 64 bit words with 8-bit bytes resulted in dual mode design that could be booted either way.
CDC...if it was like the CDC system I worked on back in the early 80s, the 6-bit chars (64 distinct chars, including control chars) did not include lower case Latin. Our system was munged so that lower case alphabetic chars could be represented by prefixing a backslash. I wrote my dissertation on that system, and fortunately the editor I used displayed a backslashed char as lower case.
You're making an assumption in that statement that there's a byte and it's eight bits in length. This was not always true. Punch cards didn't really work that way, and fair number of CPU's didn't either.
Early machines used various decimal systems and 6-bit characters were widespread also. This explains a bit of why the C language and descendants often have native support for Octal literals and Unix permissions are built around three bit groupings.
On a personal note, even in the very early 90's, I also remember using a CDC machine (a descendant of Seymour Cray's 6600) that supported 60-bit words with 6-bit characters. Pressure to move to 64 bit words with 8-bit bytes resulted in dual mode design that could be booted either way.