From: William Chops Westfield <billw@CISCO.COM>
    >    And if people weren't hung up on saving every little bit of
RAM, it
    >    wouldn't be a problem now, either.
    >
>I don't think RAM had anything to do with it.  Going to a
4-character year
>would have used up an additional 2.5% of the available columns on
the
>punched card, and taken away characters from some other field.


I'm pretty sure memory was a major issue. The "youngsters" amongst us
probably don't appreciate how much the price of RAM has fallen and
the amount has risen. My first home built system had 256 bytes afair
and useful commercial systems with 4K of core were common -  I think
the PDP8 at the engineering school in 1970 (big as 2 closets - 2
doors walk in) with less power than an original IBM PC had 4K.

With this sort of memory every bit counted - something like using a
PIC :-).

regards

            Russell McMahon