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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Rogers who wrote (19222)	5/18/1998 2:04:00 AM
From: nommedeguerre	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Bill, >>This was not a MS problem but the cost of memory in the early days. I will agree to this for software before 1980 perhaps but anything afterwards could have spared the bit to double the number of years. The most common mistake was using a bit field format to encode the time-date instead of a simple coded format. 32 bits yields every hours,mins,secs for 136 years if hms were not important 16 bits yields every day for 179 years. Having worked on systems with more limited memory than a PC during this period, I just cannot see how a few bits were critical unless the total data record was less than 10 bytes in size or something; but just having someone's name in a record would take up significantly more space relative to an extra bit. It just seems like people were taking the "easy way out" or maybe they honestly figured the software would be replaced by the year 2000. Cheers, Norm