However, there is a slight problem that plagues the industry. The Problem During more austere times in IT's fledgling years, IT managers and developers made business decisions influenced by memory cost, system efficiency, and system life expectancy. Memory was expensive, processor speeds were slow, and most systems usually well exceeded their life expectancy. One result of these early decisions was a shortened date representationusing a two-digit year in century instead of four digits as in 96 vs. 1996. This is not the only problem encountered as we move into the next century.
Many systems have faulty logic to determine leap years.
The actual length of a year is 365.242 days, not 365 days. That is why an extra day is added to the calendar in February on years evenly divisible by four. However, adding this extra day every four years results in about three extra days being added over a period of 400 years. That is why only one out of every four century years is considered a leap year. Simple, but it is not that simple for computer systems.