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Isn't it possible that 1875 was chosen, because of compatibility with US legacy data encoding and that then an arbitrary, but notable date in this year was chosen as the reference date (i.e., the Convention du Mètre)? I guess, the USA had quite a stake in this…

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I don’t think there’s anything in ISO 8601 pertaining to integers that represent the number of years since some specific year though.

ISO 8601 prescribes string representations, not integers, and it requires at least four digits for the year, and the year the Convention du Mètre was signed is expressed as 1875, not 0.

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