Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
It seems he also shared an Excel sheet with people listed way into their 200s marked as alive. I don’t think it’s just the COBOL thing. Someone mentioned how those others could be typos for that birthday. Instead of 1969 someone put in 1769. Could also be something fucky going on with the system.
Could also just be made up. Fabricating evidence in the age of the computer is not hard.
Especially when the evidence in question was just a picture of an Excel sheet iirc.
Why would an organization keep a database in Excel. Even Microsoft wouldn’t recommend that, then again I don’t think I’d use Access either, I’ve run into to many corrupt databases as they get larger, and I assume that database cant be to small
Ha, I’m currently in a company modernizing their IT systems. The number of things relying 100% on excel documents which reference other excel documents, which reference yet more excel documents is concerning. They have an entire “program” based in excel, which takes several hours a day to run, and this runs the majority of the company.
Just because you’ve not seen it, or even thought about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t out there in a live system right now.
I understand that, but at very least a database of 360,000,000 people would over exert 2gb of space, and therefore go beyond the corrupt able data space acceptable for an Access database table referenced to an excel sheet. There are holes that just don’t work the there
*I’m not an expert I have just spent 10 years dealing with troubleshooting these errors. In government as well" - life
It could’ve just been how the report was handed to Musk, I guess. I’m not sure it claimed it was the database itself, just that in the database it had that stuff.
True, quick jot it down on a laptop I suppose.
I looked it up for reference, 2gb is the max size of a table in Access before corruption may occur.