Here's the Bruce Dickens method for repairing databases full of now-suspect
two-digit years: Pick an arbitrary cutoff (say, '50); if a year has a higher number,
assume it belongs to the old century; if a year has a lower number, assume it belongs
to the new century.
Thus: '08, '11, '58, '97, becomes 2008, 2011, 1958, 1997. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a start.
That is the entire content of U.S. Patent 5,806,063, "Date Formatting and Sorting for Dates Spanning the Turn of the Century." You might think, well, duh! But if you're a patent examiner, well, duh! is not sufficient grounds for rejecting an application.
The Dickens patent was just one of a flurry of Year 2000 patents issued in the last years of the nineties. There's a method "for using biased 2 digit 'hybrid radix' numeric fields for inputting, generating, storing, processing, and outputting year numbers." There's a method "for processing date-dependent information including dates in at most two centuries wherein the date-dependent information comprises a year field specified in a two-digit format." Jargon aside, all these methods are fairly simple. There was no magic solution to the problem of cleaning up those old databases; just a small set of inevitable compromises.
When Dickens filed for his patent, he was working at McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing; later Boeing agreed to assign the patent to him, and Dickens has sent out a wave of now-standard threatening letters ("We call them cease-and-desist letters," corrects Commissioner Dickinson) to 700 of the nation's most data-rich companies. He chose his targets by combining the Fortune 500 and Information Week 500 lists.
"Before the time I invented this and came up with the Dickens patented method, there was no solution available," Dickens says, sitting with his lawyer and his publicist in Laguna Beach, Calif. "It really was a moment of discovery, I really felt elated."
He has demanded one-quarter of a percent of their total revenue. That sounds arbitrary, but it's standard; IBM and other large companies routinely calculate patent license fees as a percentage of revenue, and the percentages can be substantially higher. Sometimes a company simply has no choice.
"We think that Bruce is not really asking for a whole lot of money," says his lawyer, William Cray.
It occurs to me to wonder whether anyone knows offhand the total revenue of those 700 companies.
"Six point four trillion," Cray says.
But Dickens chose a formidable set of victims, and cyberspace has been buzzing with angry programmers offering examples of "prior art." The commissioner has now issued a special order that the patent be reexamined.
