Remember when computers took up entire rooms or whole floors in buildings? Did you know that the rooms containing the computing behemoths required special wiring in order to supply electrical power for the giant machines? The rooms were even carefully enclosed and air conditioned to cope with the heat generated by the mighty mainframe computers.

The machines themselves were imposing—gray metal cabinetry with front plates full of colored lights and toggle switches. Like acolytes in an ancient temple, lab-coated technicians service the great machines behind locked doors. Arcane instructions punched through paper cards were used to communicate with the mighty mainframe and results were returned by a machine whose first cousin is the teletype. The public was kept away from these electronic brains; they were too complex and fragile for the uninitiated to understand, much less use.

This was the computing world of the late 1950s—a time when amazing progress was being made in hardware design and software development. Many of those achievements affect computing to this day. The PC on your desk, the ATM machine at your bank, even the on-board electronics in your car all claim the massive mainframe computers of the 1950s as their ancestors.

Y2K’s Background
As with any ancestral legacy, its descendants are required to take the bad with the good. Y2K (see Ancestry, Nov/Dec 1998, pp. 55-58) is one such legacy. In the late 1950s, with electronic memory being prohibitively expensive, it became common practice to take shortcuts when structuring the format of stored data. This common practice resulted in the representation of years as simple two-digit numbers: 56 for 1956, 57 for 1957, etc.

For the primarily scientific purposes on which most computers of this time were focused, the two-digit year worked quite well—it saved space while adequately representing the year in question. And with the rapid growth in the business use of computers during this same period, cost-conscious companies found the two-digit year convention efficient on their expensive new machines.

Unfortunately, this shortcut was perpetuated as hardware, operating systems, and programming languages developed over time. Today’s computing has inherited the "bad gene" of two-digit years from its predecessors, thus Y2K.

Clearly Y2K is a bequest from past times. In the 1950s few people were worried about computer systems that could not roll their dates past 1999. After all, it was forty-some years in the future. Why worry about an event so far away? Why, indeed. As we are faced today with a multitude of potential problems resulting from the two-digit year data format, the year 2000 looms large on our horizon. How many of us plan to be flying in an airplane or even riding an elevator at midnight on 31 December 1999?

An interesting historical footnote has recently surfaced. Not all system developers of the 1950s were unaware of the need to fully represent the year with four digits. And one of the more insightful computer pioneers has issued a well deserved "I told you so!" regarding the two-digit date shortcut.

Bob Bemer, a pioneer in business computing, was recently quoted in Time magazine as having successfully confronted the two-digit year problem in the late 1950s.1 One of the most remarkable aspects of Bemer’s work on the two-digit year problem was the role genealogy played in his solution. The story of how genealogy helped solve Y2K in the late 1950s is almost the stuff of legend. But this article will provide the details that will transform the legend into true history.

The Development
As a pioneer in the development of commercial computing, Bob Bemer developed the COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) programming language in 1957. (Bob Bemer also invented the escape key, the backslash character, and is the "father" of ASCII. But those are other stories.) COMTRAN became one of the three forerunner languages of the COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) programming language. Today, COBOL remains one of the most commonly used business programming languages in the world.

Bemer’s conversations with Grace Hopper, a famous computing pioneer and the "mother" of COBOL, the previous year had convinced him that programming languages specifically for business had a future. Although evident today, the concept of a programming language useful for business purposes was revolutionary at the time.

Included in Bob Bemer’s COMTRAN language was the Picture Clause, the first programming language element to specify data format, size, and type. Much like a dictionary defines the spelling and meaning of a word, a Picture Clause defines the length of a piece of data, whether the data must contain letters or numbers, and other characteristics of the data. A picture element defines a piece of data—like the year of a date—as a four digit representation with each digit being a number between 0 to 9. In this way, a Y2K-proof data element was defined.

By 1958, Bob Bemer’s Picture Clause provided the flexibility to define a year as a complete, four-digit representation within COMTRAN and subsequently COBOL. Bemer had been concerned that the two-digit year shortcut was unnecessarily limiting, but while Bemer suspected that a four-digit representation was a necessary feature for business programming, he did not have an immediate use for it.

The Picture Clause became a standard part of the COBOL programming language. However, with processing and memory so expensive, COBOL programmers could use the Picture Clause to define a two-digit date also. Formatting year dates became optional and it was left up to the programmer to decide how to format year data. Some chose four-digit years, some did not.

The LDS Church formed an all-volunteer data processing group in July of 1958 consisting of Church members whose employers included IBM, the Rand Corporation, Hughes, etc. This group set to work writing a computer program that could demonstrate how computers might assist the Church’s genealogy efforts. As this sort of project had never been done before, the LDS group called on Bob Bemer as a consultant for their project. This is when genealogy provided Bob Bemer with his epiphany regarding four-digit dates.

The LDS computerization project was designed to take microfilmed copies of christening records from the British Isles and, by manually entering that information onto computer-readable punched cards, enter them into a computer to be sorted in a variety of ways useful for family research. For example, family group sheets could be created from the christening records showing father, mother, and child in a standard format. This project was to be the first automation of what we now know as the International Genealogical Index.

The majority of the British christenings for this project were from before 1900. Obviously, the LDS demonstration project required the ability to represent christening dates which occurred in any of several centuries in the past back to the 1500s. This need to show dates in past centuries provided Bob Bemer with "a big push to think correctly by showing that at least one class of data, with the same name (year), could have alternate characteristics and representations (two-digit or four-digit year)." As a consultant to the LDS demonstration project, Bob Bemer had been given a concrete user reason to represent a fully flexible four-digit date.

Bemer became further convinced that the four-digit date was the right thing to do when insurance companies began computerizing the life expectancy tables and individual records for their policy holders born in the nineteenth century. In 1958, a person born in 1878 was either eighty years old according to a four-digit date program or negative twenty years old according to a two-digit date program!

In 1958, the hardware running the program was an IBM model 709 mainframe computer. According to those involved with the project, the demonstration program could churn out family group sheet information at the lightning rate of 40,000 per hour! This was nothing short of amazing at the time considering that the IBM 709 had less processing power than one of today’s typical PCs.

For Bob Bemer and a few others in the computer industry, four-digit dates became a cause célèbre of good design practice. While solving the problem of pre—1900 dates for the LDS British Christening Demonstration project in 1958, four-digit dates also provided the means to solve the problem of post-2000 dates.

As the end of the 1900s approached, the thoughtful advocates of four-digit dates recognized that the commonly used two-digit date shortcut was likely to present difficulties when 1999 ended. But early warnings from the 1970s onward did little to change common programming practices. If all programmers and system designers had followed the example of Bemer and the LDS project, Y2K might have been a non-issue.

The irony that a project concerned with the past helped confirm a solution for the future is not lost on Bob Bemer. His company, Bigisoft, Inc., now specializes in helping organizations overcome the challenges of Y2K for their computer systems.

Notes
1. Taylor, Chris. "Y2K—The History and the Hype." Time 153, no. 2 (Jan. 18, 1999). http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,18051,00.html(Feb. 16, 1999).

Special Thanks to:
Bob Bemer, Kendall Wright, Dan Scott, Alan Mann, Elaine Hasleton, David Rencher, Verdon Walker, Kahlile Mehr, and Jim Allen for their assistance in preparing this article.

Mark Howells is a Certified Information Sytems Auditor and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional. He volunteers on the Internet as the host of the Norfolk-L genealogy mailing list and is chairman of the Internet Branch of the Norfolk Family History Society.