Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!hanami!landman
From: landman%hanami@Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman x61391)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: why 1904?  ms excel
Message-ID: <124276@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 7 Sep 89 17:30:59 GMT
References: <457a7553.1285f@maize.engin.umich.edu> <30291@srcsip.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: landman@sun.UUCP (Howard A. Landman x61391)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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In article <30291@srcsip.UUCP> mnkonar@src.honeywell.com (Murat N. Konar) writes:
>January 1, 1904 is the earliest date that the Mac OS will represent.  I'm not
>sure why or how this date was chosen.  It is curious though, isn't it?

Curious isn't the word.  #@(%!*8 inconvenient is more like it.

A couple of extra bits and they could have gone back to the founding of the
Gregorian calendar, which would have saved me a lot of pain in dealing with
dates in one of my Hypercard stacks.  The events I'm tracking go back to
the early 1700's, and there are *lots* of them between 1850 and 1900.  So
in order to be able to sort by date, I have to specify dates as YYYY-MM-DD
and do an alpha sort, and write special code to convert those dates to
other formats.

	Howard A. Landman
	landman@sun.com