I am attaching a patch.  While working on the patch, I noticed that although time.accept2dyear is documented as boolean, the current code expects int and treats any non-int including True as 0:

>>> time.accept2dyear = True; time.asctime((99,) + (0,)*8)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: year >= 1900 required

>>> time.accept2dyear = 1; time.asctime((99,) + (0,)*8)
'Mon Jan  1 00:00:00 1999'

This is clearly a bug.  (Although Y2K note contradicts time.accept2dyear documentation.)

Supporting year < 1900 would be a feature in my view, but I agree with SilentGhost that once we extended support to 5+ digit years, it is odd to keep year >= 1900 restriction.