> To be fair, in 1970 those 2 digits were very expensive. More than just "very expensive". Often, you were limited to exactly 80 columns for each record. If yo

> To be fair, in 1970 those 2 digits were very expensive. More than just "very expensive". Often, you were limited to exactly 80 columns for each record. If you had for instance three dates on one record, using 2 digits instead of 4 digits saved 6 columns, which is over 7% of the available space.