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by wpietri
3292 days ago
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They were stored in BCD at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal That was the right choice for the era. As mikeash points out, your approach takes more bits and more CPU cycles. But it also takes a computer to decode. Any programmer can look at a punch card, a hex dump, or even blinkenlights and read BCD. Decoding a 32-bit int for the date takes special code. Which you have to make sure to manually include in your program, the size of which you are already struggling to keep under machine limits. We've come a long way. |
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