[TUHS] Date madness

[norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)]

Arnold:

  ISTR that the vaxen did have such things.  Or rather, I ran some BSD 780s
  for several years and I don't remember having to set the date / time
  every time I did a reboot.  They sat in a data center, so I may have never
  done a cold boot from power on.  It was a LONG time ago now, so there's
  undoubtedly lots that I just plain don't remember.

====

I believe all the VAXes had time-of-year clocks, though
the implementation and the method of access varied from
model to model.  On `Big' VAXes, the clock was considered
part of the console front-end, and accessed through the
model-specific console scheme.  MicroVAXes had no console
front-end; I believe the clock was accessed through
registers, but it was an off-the-shelf digital-watch
chip with some funny format (separate registers for
year, month, day, hour, minute, second).

So they all had proper battery-backed-up clocks, but of
many different types.  It wasn't as simple as reading a
single counter out of a register, sensible as that might
seem.

If anyone's really interested I can dig up details for
the several models of Big and MicroVAX I dealt with; I
still have all the code lying around.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON