The problem was mostly that storage was expensive.
It’s difficult to understand in an era of cheap terabyte SSDs, but in the 1960s and 1970s, DASD (what IBM mainframes called hard drives) was relatively tiny and very expensive.
And so programmers did the best they could (in COBOL) to minimize the amount of data stored. Especially for things that there were lots of, like say, bank transactions. Two bytes here and two bytes there and soon enough you’re saving millions of dollars in hardware costs.
Twenty years later, and that general ledger system that underlies your entire bank’s operations just chugging along solidly 24/7/365 needs a complete audit and rewrite because those saved bytes are going to break everything in ten years.
But it was probably still cheaper than paying for the extra DASD in the first place.
It’s difficult to understand in an era of cheap terabyte SSDs, but in the 1960s and 1970s, DASD (what IBM mainframes called hard drives) was relatively tiny and very expensive.
And so programmers did the best they could (in COBOL) to minimize the amount of data stored. Especially for things that there were lots of, like say, bank transactions. Two bytes here and two bytes there and soon enough you’re saving millions of dollars in hardware costs.
Twenty years later, and that general ledger system that underlies your entire bank’s operations just chugging along solidly 24/7/365 needs a complete audit and rewrite because those saved bytes are going to break everything in ten years.
But it was probably still cheaper than paying for the extra DASD in the first place.