Re:The cost of two digits? (Score 1)

I wonder just how much more it would have cost applications to use 4 digits instead of 2. I imagine a lot of this was just needless pre-optimization, especially as the years rolled by and prices went down exponentially.

You're showing your age (or lack of it) :-)

Memory was incredibly expensive when a lot (although not all) of the "Y2K" applications were written and it was decided (correctly) that it was far cheaper to spend money on programmers, both at the time and before 2000, than on memory.
Sometimes it even went beyond cost and it became physically impossible to run a particular program on a particular machine because the program wouldn't fit in the maximum amout of memory the machine could support. In that case it was a question of "lose 50 bytes or the payroll run won't happen",

Cheers,

Jeremy