Back in the mists of time, about the time JC was a carpenter and the world was a sunnier, happier place - things were different. There weren't as many models for a start and it was usually unecessary to go to the extent of a 5-figure Serial Number, up to 9999 machines of a given model was fine. But at that time no-one had figured they were going to turn out on-highway truck engines by the tens of thousands. The same thing applied to the prefix, but then after years of 2U, 4X, etc, all of a sardine they ran out of prefixes and had to add a 3rd digit to them. Now we have things like B9H, RJG, 2BW, & SPD as prefixes and they haven't even got warmed up yet...
About the same time off-highway machinery was included into the International System of Vehicle Identification Numbers or VIN, so now we have a 17-digit plate just like you'd see on your car, although in Cat's case it's called a P(roduct)IN plate. This happened in 2001. For those of us who know we can still pick our way through the crap and at least reduce that to an 8-digit Serial Number ..............
