From The Harvester, April
1970
HOW DATES WILL BE WRITTEN IN THE FUTURE
Recently TIME magazine devoted its cover
story to “America, the
Inefficient.”
Why “nothing seems to work anymore” was blamed on our
inability to communicate and on a total lack of uniformity across the
nation and around the world.
A bulletin received by FFVA from the National Chamber of Commerce
seems to indicate that there is a battle about to be waged on at least
one of these fronts.
The International Standards Organization has made a recommendation to
the National Chamber which, if adopted, could standardize the way the
entire world would write Gregorian calendar dates.
Currently in the United States, August 17, 1970, may be written as
8-17-70 and in Europe the same date would appear as 17-8-70. The ISO
recommends that a uniform system be adopted calling for a descending
numerical order beginning with the year, then month, then day:
1970-08-17.
Proponents for the measure say the new system would ease filing
burdens as the date could be treated as one number (e.g. for insurance
or social security systems) and could be continued to include hour,
minute and second. Developers of the system say it is easily adaptable
for arithmetic computation and for use in computer systems.
Comments are invited by ISO regarding the proposed change, but must
be received not later than 1970-05-23 (5-23-70 or 23-05-70).