Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.
More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."
But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing.
Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market.
[1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995,
A. Little Endian
Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were
stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low
order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower
addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this
ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit
of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their
original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be
stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward).
Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big
end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem
in the industry.A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601
https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)
Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.
Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format).
Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.
The latter. "April fourth" would sound very odd in a British accent.
Example with lots of written dates: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/29/article-50-brexit... (but I could equally choose a formal document, like my birth certificate, or something very informal, like a handwritten note).
When spoken, the "of" is always included, and the number is always an ordinal (-th etc).
And year/month/day/hour/minute/second is best as its largest to smallest and if you name your documents / fields in this format it sorts better.
Checkuary is the unofficial 13th month of every year. It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.
As an American, I write it as 3Apr2017 to avoid ambiguity. I can't stand how the traditional all-numeric date format is neither big-endian nor little-endian.
My current British bank account didn't come with a cheque book, but the one I had when I was a student did. So probably 2009 or so; maybe one or two per year before that.
As in a home loan deposit are an outright house purchase?
In Australia when I did this it was done via a different kind of cheque, I forget what it was called because I haven't used one before or since, but I had to the bank in person to get it.
The only other time I've used a check in the recent past has been to void one for direct deposit at an employer.
I wish there was a way around both of these - I hate writing checks.
When you use your bank to pay a bill on-line, unless it's a major utility that worked with your bank to setup an ACH payment means, the bank will typically still print a paper check and send it to its destination.
We have electronic transfer (ACH) using the bank (ABA or routing number) and account number, but it's not available to regular people. People often keep these two numbers secrete to prevent identity theft.
Most other countries, you put your friends bank num, account num and name and it will show up in their account the very next day (even on holidays!) for free. In the US, you have to use 3rd party payment systems like PayPal, which charge fees and don't really do bank-to-bank transfers.
(The UK system guarantees two hours, but it's usually seconds.)
You can also use a mobile phone number instead of knowing the bank account numbers. This is extremely common in Denmark, including for purchases; the same system exists in the UK but it is less often used.
What's a "check"?