Where is SQL Server Agent and do I need it?

What did people do when they needed a date earlier than the 18th century before date and datetime2 came along??

That is an SQL Server limitation (and perhaps other DBMS). I would say that since C# (.NET) can handle a date like "01/01/0001" you can always convert your date into a long, save it to the db as a BIGINT and recreate/regenerate it after retrieval. For example, to convert today's date to a long, you can do:

var dt = DateTime.Now.ToBinary();

That is a hack, of course :)

The following line will convert the long back into a date:

var dt1 = DateTime.FromBinary(dt);

try :

start-> run->services.msc

search for the sql server agent and see if it has started