In earlier days of computing, storage was expensive. Saving two bytes for each date field multiplied by thousands of records across hundreds of files saved real

In earlier days of computing, storage was expensive. Saving two bytes for each date field multiplied by thousands of records across hundreds of files saved real money. Another example of contortion for storage saving was Packed Decimal used in mainframes, where a (say) 11-digit number could be stored in 6 bytes rather than 11. There were even IBM 360/370 assembler math operations for packed decimal so they didn't have to be decided and re-encoded for arithmetic use.