A whole byte for a year? What a waste in 1995 when you've got just 640KB for DOS, your code and your data.

I looked up my old code. Shave off a bit of the year and:

  struct Date { 
       unsigned day : 5; 
       unsigned month : 4; 
       unsigned year : 7; 
    };

a full date in 16 bits. (well, in borland C++ 5 at least)

and as it was an accounting application, working with the bitfields was so much nicer than ordinal days you would use nowadays.

month and years was all you really cared about anyway when summarising data. in finance all months have 30 days anyway.