Please confirm if this is a date bug

[Len Morgan]

I've been trying to validate a user date entry and I'm not getting what 
I  think the  correct result should be:

in the message box (for simplicity's sake):

put "05/19/1956" is a date
false

This is on Windows XP with 2.8.1.  This DOES work (i.e., returns true) 
on a Mac.

If the year is 1970 or higher, it will return true (as it should).

This seems like it might be related to bug 4911 which reported that if 
you passed "" to is a date, it returned "12/31/1969" instead of "invalid 
date"

Is there a work-around?

Len Morgan