[Info-vax] EISNER downtime from 12-JUL-2023 through 17-JUL-2023

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-07-12 20:13, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 7/12/2023 12:52 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2023-07-12 17:27, Chris Townley wrote:
>>> On 12/07/2023 15:07, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>> Den 2023-07-12 kl. 15:12, skrev Chris Townley:
>>>>> On 12/07/2023 13:30, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, 2023-07-12 at 12:21 +0100, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>>>>> At least they didn't use US centric dates.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The VMS date format, as per the subject line, was first standardised
>>>>>>> by the US Department of Defense. They picked it because it isn't
>>>>>>> anyone's native format, but everyone can understand it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I work for a British branch of a US-based company that's owned by a
>>>>>>> German firm. I use VMS format dates for all official communications,
>>>>>>> even though we haven't had VMS running for over twenty years.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's perfect.
>>>>>
>>>>> That is of course one form of standard UK date. I also regularly 
>>>>> use the DEC
>>>>> comparison format, aka Japanese date, of YYYY-MM-DD as sortable, 
>>>>> and also
>>>>> unmistakeable
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Which is also the international ISO-8601 standard date/time format.
>>>>
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601.
>>>>
>>>> Not sure why you call it "Japanese date". Japan is just one of approx.
>>>> 50 countries that has adopted ISO-8601 as its national standard.
>>>> But there is nothing else ”Japanese” about this format.
>>>>
>>>> To simplify everything, it would be better to use the ISO-6801 
>>>> standard.
>>>>
>>>> ISO-8601 has also been adopted as an US national standard:
>>>> ANSI INCITS 30-1997 (R2008) and NIST FIPS PUB 4-2.
>>>>
>>>> See the link above for further details…
>>>>
>>>
>>> I started using it before ISO-8601 (first published 1988), when it 
>>> was the
>>> Japanese date format.
>>
>> It was in use in Sweden before that time as well. Just because ISO 
>> published a
>> document about it don't mean it wasn't in existance and used before 
>> then, by
>> multiple countries. (I have no idea how long Sweden have been using 
>> this format,
>> but it feels like forever...)
>>
>>   Johnny
>>
> 
> Are we discussing DD-Mon-YYYY or YYYYMMDD ?
> 
> RSTS from the beginning used DD-Mon-YY, only 2 digits for the yesr, but 
> same format.  That was prior to 1974, not sure how long before.

The ISO standard is YYYY-MM-DD, which was called "Japanese date" for 
some obscure reason above.

I think the DD-Mmm-YY(YY) format was sortof a DEC standard format. I 
think almost all DEC OSes used that in the past, and still do.
It's good since it's pretty unambiguous.

In RSX these days, you can actually choose which date format to use:

DD-Mmm-YY
DD-Mmm-YYYY
YYYY-MM-DD

And programs that take date as input usually accept all three formats, 
with the year being inferred if just two digits are used.

   Johnny