On Oct 25, 11:49*am, "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"
wrote:
Kenneth Scharf wrote:
Actually, I think the answer lies in the fact that some early writing
was done not on paper like material with charcoal or ink, but with stone
tablets and chisels. *Since a right handed person would hold the chisel
with his left hand to strike it with a hammer held in his right, the
characters would be written from right to left. *So ancient languages
like Hebrew would have been written from right to left, and still are
even though nothing is carved in stone anymore.

While Hebrew words are written right to left, in Israel, numbers are not.

Dates are the European format, dd/mm/yy. Telephone numbers used to be six digits
123-456 and they went to 7 digits a digit was added at the beginning, so the they
became 1234-567.

Did pre WWII schematics in China and Japan go right to left? I know that Japan
had a thriving electronics industry and university level studies.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel *N3OWJ/4X1GM

Re telephone numbers. Historically smaller telephone systems had
various numbers of digits! Sometimes as few as three digits.
In large cities such as New York, London, early systems used letters
not digits to identify the switching centre. So an operator would be
asked "Get me Yonkers 2348" etc.
A famous telephone number was WHI-1212 (Namely; Whitehall one two one
two, for Scotland Yard, UK's federal police at the time).
With introduction of long distance dialling it then became was
necessary to have other WHn telephone switching exchanges. Lets' say
there was a WHITCHURCH for example. WHI could not be use for both! So
WH2 and then WH3 were used.
Eventually using letters became too cumbersome and switching offices
(in North America at least) became "All number".
For example I live in an area where the switching office code is 437-.
It's a small area and not all the possible numbers within 437- are
used. However with today's portability of numbers and computer
directed switching the concept of a switching exchange serving only
one geographic area has completely changed.
The concept of three digits identifying a switching unit within which
one could have ten thousand individual telephone subscriber numbers
0000 to 9999, along with three digit 'Area Codes' for the various
provinces, cities and states in North America also worked well and is
in use today. Heavily populated areas have several (many) area codes.
While lightly populated ones may not use more than a small percentage
of the theoretically possible one million combinations within each
area code.