It’s used in mainframes mostly. I don’t know COBOL well but I’ve worked with COBOL systems in the past. I didn’t think it even has a “date type” (at least in older systems? maybe it was added at some point?). They just store dates as 8 digits (6 back in the day which led to infamous “y2k” problems). That’s why I didn’t think they had an epoch. In more modern systems a date is typically “the number of milliseconds since the epoch”. For Linux that’s 01/01/1970. Either way this explanation for Musk’s error is pretty sus. I’m sure he’s misunderstanding something (he didn’t think the US government used SQL ffs) though.
Edit: It’s possible this particular team used that date as some sort of special value. That would be pretty common in older programming styles. But it doesn’t seem like it’s any sort of “standard.”
It’s used in mainframes mostly. I don’t know COBOL well but I’ve worked with COBOL systems in the past. I didn’t think it even has a “date type” (at least in older systems? maybe it was added at some point?). They just store dates as 8 digits (6 back in the day which led to infamous “y2k” problems). That’s why I didn’t think they had an epoch. In more modern systems a date is typically “the number of milliseconds since the epoch”. For Linux that’s 01/01/1970. Either way this explanation for Musk’s error is pretty sus. I’m sure he’s misunderstanding something (he didn’t think the US government used SQL ffs) though.
Edit: It’s possible this particular team used that date as some sort of special value. That would be pretty common in older programming styles. But it doesn’t seem like it’s any sort of “standard.”