StephenPAdams

That all said, I’m only hypothesizing here, @SimonKissane. I, like you, would like to hear from somebody at SS. The 1875 date is very curious and doesn’t come across as merely coincidental to me. It wouldnt shock me to see some bloke use that reference date as some sort of default value or some epoch mechanism. That said, I don’t think Elon is smart enough to read integer based dates, so maybe it isn’t epoch based and just a default value that was cleverly plucked from the ISO standard.

The update in 2000 did (reference 4.3.2.1). And these implementations are important because often government agencies like to leverage standards instead of rolling their own. Either way, 2000 was a minor revision to 1988, so i am curious if it was inclusive then.

1875 is most definitely mentioned in the ISO8601 specification. We can even look at the recent inclusion in the ISO8601 standard as of 8601:2004 on page 8, specifically, Section 3.2.1. The thing is nobody here has posted specifically about the Social Security inplementation and whether or not they defaulted to some 0 value to indicate that 1875 date similar to how seconds since the epoch exists in Unix/Linux implementations.