"dd MON yy" is US military format, and I can see early computer scientists adopting it for its inherent unambiguity (and also extending it to yyyy for reasons that became obvious).
Americans colloquially prefer m/d/yy (slashes) rather than dashes, anyway.
Computer scientists and similar have never liked it, so this isn’t surprising.
Yeah. And we ultimately all quickly settled on the ISO-like format YYYY-MM-DD (with optional and varying delimiters, it does not have to be exactly ISO), which makes the most sense of all because you can just lexicographically sort it (e.g. when listing file names).
Systems from DEC also prefered this date format (RSX11 and VMS).