I always forget the US doesn't use A4 etc. (or do you?)
I don’t think I saw a “us letter” sized piece of paper until I was an adult.
I'm not sure how; the UK is an Anglosphere country that uses A4 and desktop machines as far back as I can remember (mid 90s) also correctly defaulted to A4 when printing. I suspect it's more likely to be that there's been English (UK) and English (US) options in OS's for a long time and Aus got defaulted to English (US) rather than English (UK) which carried some settings that weren't correct by default.
Apparently the reagan admin is responsible for making this our official government document size, and no one knows exactly why this size was chosen.
Or laugh at ourselves about it, which is what we normally do.
I think switching to metric would make far more sense than this.
On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.
I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...
The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.
> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."
Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:
> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...
“The most beautiful invention of all time”