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In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Vladivostok to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.

In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Wladiwostock to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.

In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Wladiwostock to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.

In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Vladivostok to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.

That is only true and needed if the CPU in question cannot handle BCD native. IBM's, DEC's, Intel's, Motorola's CPU architectures all can.

No-one would have ever thought of such bloaty formats back then.

• optimal storage (3 byte per date)
• No constant conversion from and to binary needed
• Conversion to readable (EBCDIC, not ASCII) is a single machine instruction. In fact, EBCDIC stands for "Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code" as it was specifically designed for this.
• Calculations can be done without converting and filling by using BCD instructions.

In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Vladivostock to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.

That is only true and needed if the CPU in question can not handle BCD native.

Noone would have ever thought of such bloaty formats back then.

• optimal storage (3 byte per date)
• No constant conversion from and to binary needed
• Conversion to readable (mostly EBCDIC, not ASCII) is a single machine instruction.
• Calculations can be done without converting and filling by using BCD instructions.

In the end we still had to stop short before midnight MEZ and restart a minute later, as management decided that this would be a good measure to avoid roll over problems. Well, their decision. And as usual a completely useless one, as the system did run multiple time zones (almost around the world, Wladiwostock to French Guiana), so it passed multiple roll over points that night.