[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[random832@fastmail.com (Random832)]

On Tue, Jan 2, 2018, at 21:42, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > 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).
> 
> But east postive is an artifact of north up.

Who says right is positive? Anyway, there's a natural reason to want east to be positive in this case completely independent of maps - so that your timezone offset is the number that you add to UTC to get the current local time, rather than subtracting.

Incidentally, the V6 code for ctime has the number of *seconds* west of UTC as an *int* - a situation rather worse for parts of Australia than simply requiring a negative number.

I'm not exactly sure what AUSAM does. The archive shows ctime.s (its own implementation) with "timezone" as zero, with a note saying to set it to 1*60.*60. for daylight saving. This suggests that the time was simply maintained with an epoch of 1970-01-01 00:00 AEST, but the time(II) manpage says GMT.