Borland

with a 2 in his first version in the early 80s.

But by the time that shapefiles debuted in ArcView 2 in 95, Dbase was a mature technology owned by a company called Borland, which is a major software company.

Meaning this was an obviously relevant file that was going to be with us for a while, much like Borland.

And then one last quirk we may need to mention because it can come up is basically, are you writing a number starting with the highest value first in decreasing order, like in the English language, where we start with the hundreds, then the 20, then the 3? Or are we doing it like in Hebrew, where since you're reading from right to left, you're actually starting with the 3, then the 20, then the 100? It doesn't actually matter which way you do it, but what's most important is you pick one and stick with it.

And what do you think, Ezra, you picked for Sheffield? Big Indian or little Indian? They decided to split the baby and compromise by making shapefiles both little endian for certain fields and big endian for others.