What was the day of the week for that date ?

 For example:  August 12, 2012   just punch in:  day of week aug 12 2012  into your fave search mechanism and you get:

an insignificant date for me but it was a Sunday

Easy !  Fast !  Assume it's correct :)

I used to work for a Windows "shop" - our main program used email for group calendaring.  This was pre-internet, 386 boxes, windows 3.1, 10 megabyte hard drives, wired network with Netware,  et cetera (the stone age).

But people were interested in answering silly questions with our program like: what was the day of the week their nephew was born ?  As long as the date wasn't too far back, no problem.  Just proceed backwards in time and view the calendar for the date you were interested in.

But with an older date there could be problems.  For example:  November 22, 1963,

December 7, 1941

or November 19, 1863.

 Problems happened because the program would kerchunk in a non-zero sized file for each time period (I can't remember if it was days/weeks or months).  So if at the start the hard drive was maybe half full you'd get to a point where it would become jammed with these silly, empty files generated by our program.  The system would crash.   And then someone would have to manually delete all those empty but non-zero length files.

I shudder to think what would have happened with our program if someone had been reading Longfellow's: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (April 18, 1775 was a Tuesday).

On the other hand (this was roughly 1994) there were other more serious customers (the military) who had tested the program for Y2K (remember that??) - they didn't worry over disk space, they worried about the program working correctly after January 1, 2000 so they checked - needless to say our program was found wanting.

Oh the joys of being in Quality Assurance :)

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm