Greetings, I'm curious to know if anyone can explain the purpose and/or benifits of the military date-time group format. As I understand it, the format is as follows ddhhmmss[TZ][Mon]YY Where dd - numeric date hh, mm, ss - numeric hours, min sec (24hr format) [TZ] - one letter timezone designator [Mon] - month (3 letter abbreviation) YY -- two digit year My question is WHY??? I can see how the standard military date format (dd [mon] yy) both conforms to the international standard fo day-before-month (unlike in the USA) and using a 3-letter abbrev for month also helps further alleviate ambiguity. I can see how using an ISO 8601 date format has advantages (such as having files automatically organized in chronological in a computer directory). But I see NO advantages to the military DTG format. Can anyone shed any light on the subject? Thanks!
I am no expert, but I would have thought the fact that the GPS satellites are provided by the US military would have something to do with it.
Hi, Thanks for your response. Yours is a good guess....but this format has been in use by the military for dating telex traffic since long before GPS was around. (Even though it is not a strictly "gps sat-nav" question, I posted to this newsgroup because it was the only one I could find...or at least get access to.....on USENET that had previous messages which dealt with this sort of data format question.)
Quiet Voice wrote ... I suspect the best answer you will come up with is "Because"! It's likely that the standard is simply the format that was in use when usage became widespread and never got changed, so it will just have been what seemed a good idea to someone at the time. Whoever it was probably would never have considered that he was designing a standard! David
Many "standards" are not the result of design, they just sort of happen. Happy trails, Gary (net.yogi.bear)
just guessing but it gives the important info first, i.e. telexes and signals would arrive soon after being sent, but 2 could possibly crossover so the 1st thing a military chap would need to know is the day it was sent followed by the time, the month and year are not really important for something that you need to react to immediately as for the timezone - a standard could be set, e.g. UTC, or you can allow local time to be used but then you need to identify the timezone so that you can set it in chronological order with other signals etc
I've seen the US mil use dozens of formats for date and time. Possibly in recent years they've settled on a more common standard. Gasp, I've even seen them use the PROPER ISO format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (Officially a "T" should be inserted between the DD and HH, but I find that messy). The only worldwid standard format is ISO 8601 which is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.xxxx http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html TZ seems silly. The military should understand the value and importance of coordinating and recording time in UTC. Let local people (& systems) convert it to local time if need be... Except that with legacy data you don't know how it was really encoded (unless a description is in the file). Back when memory was expensive, programmers when to all kinds of lengths to pack dates so that 230778 was pretty clear, but what does 071278 mean? Like many things, it probably began arbitrarily, and then becopmes an ad hoc standard, and then some sob makes it policy and everyone is screwed. Cheers, Alan
When I was in the Navy, the teletype machine was going 24/ 7... The DTG made it much easier for the communications crew to put these telexes in order on the clipboard which was read and initialed by the various commanders... (For what it's worth)
Thanks for the response. Y'know....now that I think about it, you're probably right!! So much of what happens in the military reminds me of that joke about a camel being a horse designed by comittee. So bunch of bureaucrats buried deep in the bowels of the pentagon just somehow "come up" with an idea and >>presto<< hundreds for front-line GI grunts are saddled with a dumb burden.... After all, who was the genius who came up with the idea for those berets???? Does a hell of a job keeping the sun out of their eyes, I'll bet! But then, pentagon bureaucrats don't need to worry about little thintgs like that..... Opps, now you've gotten me on a rant! [PS: Anyway, thank for the input. Any ideas where else one might go to track down an answer? I tried sci.military but google won't let me post there.]
That is worth a lot ... almost as much as if everyone adopted the ISO format once and for all... Cheers, Alan.
You should sent you question to the show called Mail Call on the History Channel and maybe it can get answered there.
