[TUHS] DECtapes under the UNIX room floor

[John Cowan via TUHS]

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 4:32 AM G. Branden Robinson via TUHS
<tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

\> > Was there a precedent for the choice of sixtieths of a second?
>
> We may be spoiled for choice; sexagesimal goes back over 4,000 years to
> the ancient Sumerians.  ;-)
>
> It's also the mains line frequency in North America.  I don't know if
> anyone's ever clocked a digital computer that slow, but some peripherals
> might have stuck a rectifier on the mains and used that for a clock.

See the '"Electronics" and "Computing" sections of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_(time).