Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

My fiance and I thought about seriously getting married that day.

And then we decided to wait until I graduate college.

Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

A statement that is simultaneously true and untrue. Newspeak?

True, it will only happen once this week around 1 in the morning.
False, the date and time of 01:02:03 4/5/06 happens at least once every hundred years. Twice in civilian life.

I remember listening to Allison Steele ("The Nightbird") on WNEW-FM 102.7 late one night when she simply said between songs "it's 12345678". It took me a moment to realize that it indeed was 12:34 on 5/6/78.

Not long after that, I remarked to a colleague that it was 12:35:56 7/8/90, one of each digit.

Don

Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

Im wondering now - when did we adopt the mm/dd/yy format for dates? if it was within the last 100 years then nobody ever observed that it was 01:02:03 on 04/05/06, because the date would have been written (most likely) as April 5, 1906 AD.

So technically, it hasnt 'happened' before.

Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

While many assert that the two-digit year format was adopted (meaning 'invented') to conserve data bits in computers mid-20th century, I have a hard time believing that people writing longhand in the 18th or 19th century with feather quills dipped in ink would find the need to use a four-digit year.

This article states that the clerical industry adopted that convention well before the 1930's onset of 'computers'. Now, if you look at official and formal documents, which also happen to be those most likely to be preserved today, they pretty much exclusively use the four digit date - just like today. But informal jottings, or numbingly repetitious journal entries by a clerk or accountant? Doubtful.

Ever hear of a "miner eighteen forty-niner"? Nope, the "18" was dropped. 2-digit year.

If 01:02:03 04/05/1906 came and nobody thought to write the date that way*, did it ever happen?

Don

(*minus the century, of course)

Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

why not? 100 years ago they had nothing better to do :^)

In 1906 the industrial revolution was just getting under way, many people lived on farms and most people in the cities worked in factories 12 hours a day. I dont think the book keeping notiations of clerks and accountants was used by the average person.

Its interesting to look back, we forget how many things we project on our ancestors, assuming their lives were just like ours.

Time for example. Seconds were not used as a measure of time until the mechanical clock was invented. The first clocks only had hour hands. A minute hand was added later, and then a 'second' hand was added, and suddenly we were all rushing around to be ontime to the nearest second.

Re: Totally useless trivia fact...
 

In Israel and Europe (not sure about Asia and the rest of the continents) the date
is written dd/mm/yy instead of the weird American way of mm/dd/yy. As a result, we will be experiencing the time 01:02:03 04/05/06 in 3 weeks.

David