[Info-vax] Why is starting epoch 17 Nov 1858?

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 14 Mar 2021 12:25:14 +0000, Tom Wade wrote:

> Consider the first thing that was 'metricated'.  It was rolled out in
> the US first, and gradually found its way across the world.  It was
> money. Prior to independence, you would have used the irrational system
> of 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound.  The
> founding fathers replaced that with a decimal system of 100 cents to the
> dollar. So $2.65 and 265c are the same thing, and this brilliant idea
> rapidly spread to the rest of the world.  Britain and Ireland were the
> last holdouts that still used non-decimal units like
> pounds-shilling-pence until 1970.

15th February 1971 in the UK; I remember it well.

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