I dunno. I don't think that adding two more digits in the 1960s to year
fields would have really made any problems too hard.
you've obviously never tried to write business applications for a
machine with only a few Kbytes of memory. memory was expensive
in the 1960s, and limited in size. so was secondary storage.
people optimized every byte, and for good reasons.
And you can't say that it was a technological barrier, because
they were still making Y2K-related mistakes into the 1980s and beyond.
up and into the early 1980s the technological barrier was real.
after that, some of the problems were habit or oversight and some
of them were due to the need to backward compatibility. there's
also a more subtle problem that it's difficult to maintain old software
and every time you fix an old bug you stand a good chance of introducing
a new one. so software tends not to get updated as long as it's mostly
working. it's hardly surprising that people didn't bother to fix
some of the y2k problems until they were forced to do so.
Why settle for a "considerable amount" (which time will show to be less
considerable than first believed) when a "nearly infinite amount" can be
designed into the project?
this has been explained already. "nearly infinite" imposes technological
limitations which make it unimplementable at wire speeds, and thus,
undeployable.
and I've already addressed most of the other questions you ask, so I'm
not going to respond to them again.
Keith