That reminds me of CDCs, which used a six-bit character set, so that ten characters would fit in the sixty-bit word. Text manipulation in Fortran was … interesting.
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Not just six digit dates - dates and times in general and where so many things go wrong. ISO 8601 has been around since 1988 giving a standard format for dates and times - and still programmers and designers go their own merry way - and that’s before we get to all the hilarity caused to foreigners by the US MMDDYY, 12 hour clock system.
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Yep. I imagine a bunch of more bad ideas will come to the fore as we get closer to the Epochalypse (Y2038).
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Not likely. I wouldn’t take that bet.
Whatever work around is forced on the flight crew is likely less costly than fixing the systems. Even when combined with the frequency this occurs. The cost to fix it likely has negative ROI by a lot.
I would bet when they “solved” the Y2K problem, instead of increasing the field sizes they implemented windowing instead. For example, just assume any 2 digit year less than say 25 starts as 20XX and over 25 is 19XX. Keep changing that window number every year. People born in 2026 aren’t buying plane tickets today.
Back when this was being fixed just prior to 2000, that windowing solution was probably way cheaper than expanding the size of the field everywhere. They either figured some follow on project would replace it (ha, nice thought) or that it occurred rarely enough that just dealing with 100+ year olds as exceptions was easier. There’s probably some standard “work around” procedure to deal with it. That isn’t really a “work around” after 20+ years of being the standard procedure.
I remember reading somewhere that even with the huge cost of all the Y2K projects to deal with 2 digit years, that it was still cheaper than storing all those “19” would have been, when “19” was the only possible value. How storage prices have dropped since then, and now the extra space is practically nothing.
The bigger question to me is, didn’t they already have 100 year old passengers when the system was built the first time?
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i actually wonder about the description of the problem. it seems unlikely that the airline would even bother storing “age” - what happens at around your birthday? more likely they store your birthdate
so i’d guess the problem is more simple: the onscreen ( or printed ) age probably only has space for two digits. so anyone looking at the results sees the wrong value. but it’s not storage per se
similarly, how long have airlines even cared about knowing the age of their passengers? there probably were few if any regulations around children flying when the software was originally written. while birthdate seems like an obvious go to for identifying a person ( ex. for reservations, even pre all the security theater )
( eta: a more horrifying possibility is that it’s in a transmission format between computer systems. someone needed to report age, and they had to pack it into bits with other data. better even if the format was never officially documented )
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It’s birthdate not age. If your birthday is 111111.
How old are you today?
How old will you be on Christmas 2024?
As the myriad of systems that identify you as a passenger pass around your birthdate, how old does each of them think you are?
Teenager or elderly person showing up?
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Yea, in that link that I posted above, it calls out banking even deeper:
Reuters reported that 220 billion lines of common business-oriented language (COBOL) code remain in financial systems worldwide, which equates to COBOL handling $3 trillion of trade daily.
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If ticket type = adult, and age field indicates minor, raise manual flag to check.
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If (passenger_requirement == “wheelchair”) then PROVIDE A FECKIN WHEELCHAIR.
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That’s just an outright lazy programming bug assuming birth year can only be two digits.
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I took COBOL as a joke (my dad was a programmer) over 30 years later I’m still programming in COBOL. 
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My dad worked on computers for the Air Force in the early 1950s. He loved COBOL. He would have hated the current world of coding-he thought the space constraints of COBOL lead to elegant programs. He did like modems and being able to work remotely before he died in 1992.
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I’ll just point out that for librarians, Y2K came two years early
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Yes!
I work on the control and monitoring systems for power generation (mostly solar farms), and I was just marvelling with a colleague at how dates and times are possibly the largest single source of problems we encounter.
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My own career was fortuitously devoid of real-world traditional COBOL programming. But you’d see another team poring over their reams of program printouts and wonder how a non-C, non-Java, etc. programmer ever kept their sanity. 0_o
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