Ooh, that's pretty important! And that was in 01894. I've probably omitted lots of important things like that.
I guess it's because dates aren't numbers any more, but names. It would be like adding an "O" in front of every name, like "Ojohn", "Omary".
The powerful effect of such small things can be very thought-provoking.
Interestingly, it's true for me too, even though I've been trying this Long Now date format experiment for a year or so now. I just had to stop myself from writing the Intel 8080 as "08080", suggesting that I'm mentally parsing these dates as "0 1774" and the like.