Since the format you use is a rather peculiar one, this is going to be tricky. Basically, you're going to have to break up $date into the different values using substr() and then use mktime() to turn it into a unix timestamp, the format that PHP understands best, and finally format it using date(). Try this:
<?
$date = "08142001-1109";
// assign each substring ("08", "14", etc.) to its own variable
$date_month = substr($date,0,2);
$date_day = substr($date,2,2);
$date_year = substr($date,4,4);
$date_hour = substr($date,9,2);
$date_min = substr($date,11,2);
// turn the values into a unix timestamp and assign it to a variable
$unixdate = mktime ($date_hour, $date_min, 0, $date_month, $date_day, $date_year);
// use date() to put the timestamp into a pretty format and assign it to a variable
$prettydate = date('m/d/Y \a\t h:ia',$unixdate);
// print the final result
print($prettydate);
?>
Note that date() is very flexible and will put the date in any format you wish. Read the page on PHP.net about date() for more information -- pay special attention to Example 3 which talks about escaping. Here are the relevant URLs:
date() - http://php.net/date
mktime() - http://php.net/mktime
substr() - http://php.net/substr
