why 1904? ms excel

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Article #4115

#4115

From: Eric Taylor
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 1989 04:00

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I have a question....

From MS Excel User's Guide v 1.03 for the Mac:

Excel stores dates and times as serial numbers from 0 to 49710, where
0 is the number for January 1, 1904, and 49710 is the number for February 6,
2040.  Times are stored as decimal fractions.  For example, the serial
number for noon on 6/1/85 is 29735.5.  You can see a date's serial number in
the forumla bar by formatting the cell containing the date with general
format.

Why 1904?  I don't see why they chose that year rather than 1900 (which makes
a little sense), or ibmpcs which have 1980 (the birth of the pc's) as 
the start date.

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!caen.engin.umich.edu!edt
From: edt@caen.engin.umich.edu (Eric Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: why 1904?  ms excel
Message-ID: <457a7553.1285f@maize.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 6 Sep 89 04:00:00 GMT
Reply-To: edt@caen.engin.umich.edu ()
Organization: Univ. of Michigan College of Engineering, Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 14