OK Wirt, mea culpa, Many years ago I used system date format and you are
right it probably should have been in text format, but there are reasons
you didn't mention:
 
1. You could use HP intrinsics to expand it.
2.  The dates collated correctly.
3.  This was in a 3000 Model II when memory and disk space were at a
    premium.
4.  We later developed in house routines to extract the date where we
    we needed them in YYMMDD format for selection purposes.  Really didn't
    work badly at all.
 
This is not to say that I would do the same thing today.
 
Regards,
 
NMD