Date class does not work for dates older than 1970?

Have not had a chance to confirm the bug, but did not want to
drop it - pavani.
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From ###@###.### Wed Jan 31 03:27:15 1996
Comments: Authenticated sender is <###@###.###>
From: "Paul Ambrose" <###@###.###>
To: "WebLogic Beta Information" <###@###.###>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 22:35:43 +0000
Subject: Problems with retrieving Dates before 1970

Hello Everyone,

The Java Date class does not support dates
earlier than 1/1/70. To see this in action, try including:
new Date(69,0,1) in your code. Amazingly, the Java docs use
1963 in their examples!!

Because of this, the WebLogic 1.43 release crashes when you do a
rec.getValue("datefield").asDate()
on a value less than 1/1/70. We have a patch that
stops the crash and returns a null object instead.
Values after 1/1/70 are returned without any problem.

The good news is:
rec.getValue("datefield").asString()
works on any date.

Please contact me if you want the patch. We will incorporate
the fix in the next release.

I have to believe that the Java group will fix the Date class soon.

Paul