Well, as someone has pointed out, the problem began with COBOL itself.
If you:
MOVE BLOP FROM DATE.
then BLOP gets a 2-digit year (and other stuff). So there is a strong
bias among COBOL programmers to express the year in two digits, since
otherwise they'd have to come up with some algorithm for guessing what
the other two digits ought to be. And we all know how much programmers
*love* guessing. Unix seems cleaner because there's precious little
COBOL code (relatively speaking) running around inside Unix systems.
(Assuming VMS is still around in 2038, us fans will be snickering, since
VMS' date format won't overflow for another 28,000 years or so.)
(Please don't tell me that Grace Hopper specified DATE this way. I want
to keep some of my illusions intact.)-:
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu A bug on the windshield of an onrushing future.