I don't have much personal experience in the matter, but I believe it's the mentality of working with very constrained systems, in this case limited memory, sto

I don't have much personal experience in the matter, but I believe it's the mentality of working with very constrained systems, in this case limited memory, storage, processing. It was/is considered efficient and elegant, to shave off any possible unnecessary space or operations. Those extra 2 bytes meant and "cost" a big deal more than they do now. At least, that's what I imagine is a reason behind the decision to use 2 digits to represent a year. Future programmers will be asking us too, why we thought it was a good idea to use signed 32-bit binary integers to represent time - when we should have known it would run out soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem