At least back when my bicycle was made in August 1981, the serial number made sense, assuming you know the syntax.
My bike’s serial number starts with H1???
H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so that was made in the 8th month, August.
1 is the last digit of the year in the 1980s, so 1981.
Things were almost so much simpler once upon a time, but yeah the coding of model names and serial numbers has definitely gotten more complicated over the years decades…
stoy@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Using that as a product name will introduce more risk of errors, and for the main consumer, businesses, it makes more sense to use a short product code.
Imagine an IT manager ordering new monitors, they can just call their supplier up and say:
Instead of saying
The first one is far easier to parse and make sure you get the stuff you want, the other is far more prone to errors.
This is not even getting into the issues with product databases and inventory management.
Uranium_Green@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
To add to this, it’s a hell of a lot easier to cross language barriers with the the alphanumeric product name than it is with the English name, which only works for English and would need accurately translating for every language&product for every region you want to buy/sell in.
It would be an absolute nightmare to try for every product that’s sold in multiple regions, etc
scheep@lemmy.world 5 days ago
fair point. Dell in my opinion isn’t so bad at this, especially given their extensive range of products for both consumers and businesses