The document explains why some legacy systems use 1875 as a base year for dates, particularly in Social Security systems, due to practical constraints and data storage optimization in early computing. The choice of 1875 was based on logical considerations about the earliest possible birth dates for Social Security beneficiaries, rather than being a COBOL-specific implementation.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/does-or-did-cobol-default-to-1875-05-20-for-corrupt-or-missing-dates

#datastorage #legacysystems #socialsecurity #dateformats #computinghistory