Julian Date Minutiae

What we (you, me, everyone in the JD Edwards universe) have always referred to as "Julian Date" is actual an Ordinal Date.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_date


It is not, however, an ISO 8601 compliant Ordinal Date as ISO 8601 requires the use of 4 digit years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates


The Julian Date is actually "...the interval of time in days and fractions of a day, since January 1, 4713 BC Greenwich noon, Julian proleptic calendar."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_date


Do you suppose that 2454991.33472 ago, some guy was standing there with a sundial and said "Now!" to start the whole thing ticking?




Now you know...

the JD Edwards Julian Date is actually also referred to, in certain IBM books, as a "JDE Date".

The 6 figure julian date was an invention by Ed McVaney himself I believe - although that might not actually be true (it might have been created by one of the other founders, like Jack Thompson) - and it was designed to overcome the storage issue of storing 8 figure dates in a system.