[TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Mon Jan 1 10:15:19 AEST 2018


On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Kurt H Maier wrote:

> I am confident ARPANET did not pin time to AEDT.  Even if you go by UTC 
> you've still got about fifteen minutes to wait for 1 JAN 2018.

So am I, but what reference *am* I supposed to use, FFS?  The USA is 
several zones behind UTC[*], and almost a whole day behind Australia 
(where I live).

My "on this day" policy is to use the local time if it can be narrowed to 
a particular zone where the event happened (and if it makes sense); if it 
was universal e.g. moon landings then I'll use UTC; otherwise I'll use the 
commonly-observed date e.g. the start/end of the world wars.

I'm open to suggestions (including FOAD, in which case I'll simply find 
something better to do).

[*]
A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to 
when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT 
boxes in here in Australia.  At installation time, we had to express the 
time offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief 
that Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it 
saved an entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."



More information about the TUHS mailing list