Man, it would have been nice for printing numbers in bases greater than ten (e.g. hex) if 0-9 had come right before A-Z.
For the curious, I recommend the book "Coded Character Sets: History and Development" by Charles E. Mackenzie. It's an older book, and so it's about the pre-Unicode, US-centric codes. Also, most of the pages focus on the many variants of EBCDIC rather than the stabler ASCII standard. But I guarantee that it will give you a lot of historical perspective.
- "The digits 0–9 were arranged so they correspond to values in binary prefixed with 011, making conversion with binary-coded decimal straightforward."
- "The letter "A" was placed in position 0x41 to match the draft of the corresponding British standard."
(Source: wikipedia.)
“B4.2 Base 12 Numeric Digits. For those applications requiring use of the sterling monetary system or duodecimal arithmetic, the digits 10 and 11 can replace the two graphics immediately following the digit 9.”
4 farthings = 1 penny
48 farthings = 1 shilling
960 farthings = £1
There were farthings, half-pennies, pennies, threepences, sixpences, shillings, florins, and half-crowns.
I guess we're lucky in only having to fiddle around with dates in awkward formats.
And that thing that isn't the metric system.
I always thought the guinea was particularly funny, given that it doesn't really add much in the way of demarcation.