UTC time

[Jerry Feldman]

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
>   
>> WRT: Local Time vs. UTC time. Unix was originally designed as a time 
>> sharing system. The developers Thompson, Ritchie, Khernigan realized 
>> that it would be used in different time zones, so not only was it 
>> designed to use UTC, but it was designed to use epoch time (specifically 
>> the number of seconds since midnight, Jan 1, 1970. All had also been 
>> involved with Multics. It was never intended to be a single user desktop 
>> system. The IBM PC was intended as a standalone desktop system, and in 
>> that context, local time was appropriate. MS-DOS itself was a very 
>> lightweight "operating system". At that time data communications was 
>> pretty much limited to a maximum of 1200 bps over phone lines. 
>> Networking was never part of MS-DOS, and was added to some versions 
>> Windows 3.1. By that time, local time was cast in concrete.  
>> Unfortunately, the designers of Windows NT did not change this.
>>     
>
> And M$ products will continue to be plagued by issues like those outlined here:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html
> until they fix it.  The problem is that DOS is long gone, and now microshaft
> actually does sell server software that is supposed to be up 24/7/365.  The
> fact that they're too stubborn to fix how they deal with something as basic as
> /time/ speaks volumes about how broken the rest of the system is.
>
> On a related note, I love the clock applet in gnome 2.22 (fedora 9).  There's
> a little drop down thing where you can add "locations", and it not only tells
> you the local time at all your locations when you expand it to show the
> calendar, but offers a one-button switch to that time zone.  Awesome for
> travelling laptops (and their owners).
>   
Agreed. Cutler et. al. had the opportunity to fix this when he stole
Windows NT (eg. VMS) from Digital. The Unix designers, Thompson,
Khernigan, Ritchie, has the foresight to understand that UTC is a much
better mechanism to transfer data across networks. And, it was being
done with Unix long before MS-DOS was created. One area even more
important than the simple transferring of data, is the sharing of files.
Consider a source control system on a shared file system with systems.
If 2 systems have different times, the wrong files could be updated.
This actually happened to me where my system was a Unix (Ultrix) and the
other system was a VAX/VMS system.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
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