Your octal year notation is very much throwing me off.

That's the notation adopted by the Long Now Foundation (https://longnow.org/) rather than octal, I believe

Ah, thank you, I was wondering.

Me too. It is interesting how such a small anomaly in writing can be so annoying and disruptive to the smooth flow of reading.

My thoughts exactly, I couldn't believe how completely I failed to parse these as dates just because of a tiny leading zero.

I guess it's because dates aren't numbers any more, but names. It would be like adding an "O" in front of every name, like "Ojohn", "Omary".

Like the Hackaday blog, [stavros]? On some other fora people use @: @stavros.

The powerful effect of such small things can be very thought-provoking.

Interestingly, it's true for me too, even though I've been trying this Long Now date format experiment for a year or so now. I just had to stop myself from writing the Intel 8080 as "08080", suggesting that I'm mentally parsing these dates as "0 1774" and the like.