Date: 28 Sep 2005 20:35:20 GMT From: Dave Hinz <DaveHinznospamcop.net> Subject: Re: Coutanche
On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:19:05 GMT, James Sweet <jamessweetnospamail.com> wrote: > > I don't know if it's true of cars, but with many products it's not uncommon > for the serial numbers to not run sequentially, I'm not sure why they do > this though. oooh! oooh! I know this one, pick me! Um. Sorry about that. But, serial numbering schemes can be quite useful and a good way to build useful information into a non-obvious form. Date coding is the most obvious - serial (or item) number 814, for instance, is the 14th item of the 8th month. Switch to A, B, and C for October, November, and December, and you can do up to 100 items per month with just 3 digits. So, B93 would be the 93rd item in November, that sort of thing. Add a place of manufacture to it, and a year, and you could have something like Sun Microsystems uses: 521k0001 ^ Last digit of year of manufacture ^^ Week of that year in which item was produced ^ Location code showing plant where item was built ^^^^ Actual serialized number of items meeting previous criteria So, if Sun built 53 servers in plant "k" that week, they'd be from 521k0001 to 521k0053, and next week it's start with 522k0001. There's your gap. Then again, it could just be something like "we left room for 500 and didn't make that many". Hard to know. Dave Hinz
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