Page 22 of 43

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 4:09 am
by swensont
The US has done MM/DD/YY because the normal way of writing a date is:

January 25, 2000

With that layout, when moving to all numbers, it stayed the same.

In the Military, it is similar to Europe, in that is DD/MM/YY, but never in just numbers:

25 Jan 2000

The month is always in three letters.

Just a matter of getting used to different date formats.

Tim

Re: Date formats

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 9:29 am
by stephen_usher
And then... there's the big-endian numeric variants which have the year first, either two or four digits. With the full year number it's completely unabiguous to the point where separators can be omitted, e.g. ISO 8601

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 4:54 pm
by Dave
swensont wrote:January 25, 2000
It must be remembered that America was the first country so large that the month a message was sent was important data - until the 1920s, it took 6-8 weeks for messages to pass from coast to coast.

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 6:38 pm
by pjw
Dave wrote:It must be remembered that America was the first country so large that the month a message was sent was important data - until the 1920s, it took 6-8 weeks for messages to pass from coast to coast.
I know Americans like to think so. However, Russia, Canada and China are bigger. I guess Russia is so large they put the year first. Presumably thats how we ended up with the international system: YYYYMMDD

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:21 pm
by Dave
pjw wrote:
Dave wrote:It must be remembered that America was the first country so large that the month a message was sent was important data - until the 1920s, it took 6-8 weeks for messages to pass from coast to coast.
I know Americans like to think so. However, Russia, Canada and China are bigger. I guess Russia is so large they put the year first. Presumably thats how we ended up with the international system: YYYYMMDD
Russia and China did not have the types of society where cross country messaging was needed much, let alone quickly. Canada being a British territory and Commonwealth member followed UK date format by default.

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2020 7:27 pm
by Pr0f
Happy Birthday Tetroid ! :D

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 7:44 am
by vanpeebles
Happy Birthday Norman Dunbar!!

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 7:56 am
by Pr0f
Happy Birthday to Norman - one of those special ones with a 0 at the end :-)

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 9:30 am
by NormanDunbar
Thanks very much Gents, I am indeed celebrating today, the 40th anniversary of my 21st birthday by eating one of my wife's giant fruity scones (rhymes with "gone", not with "stone"!) and working remotely. Oh yes, today I uploaded the final proofs for my book - all 607 pages!

I sadly have to report that none of the presents everyone has sent me have arrived. :( I'm assuming this is simply because none of you have been able to get to the post office under the current rules? ;) ;) ;) ;)

Cheers,
Norm.

Re: Happy Birthday!

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:15 am
by dilwyn
NormanDunbar wrote:I sadly have to report that none of the presents everyone has sent me have arrived. :( I'm assuming this is simply because none of you have been able to get to the post office under the current rules? ;) ;) ;) ;)
Cheers,
Norm.
Your present this year consists of a few electrons neatly arranged to resemble the phrase "Happy Birthday Norman" :lol: