From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 11:41:35 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Date madness In-Reply-To: <201712132046.vBDKkPbk002217@freefriends.org> References: <20171213171625.6FB1418C094@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <201712132046.vBDKkPbk002217@freefriends.org> Message-ID: On 12/13/17, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > 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. The first two VAXen, the 11/780 and 11/750, both had TOY clocks that ran when the machine was powered off. The 11/730 was designed to be a low-cost VAX, and one of the ways they lowered the cost was elimination of the TOY clock. VMS (and I assume also UNIX) asked you to enter the time whenever you cold booted the 11/730. After the 11/730 came out, Dick Hustvedt (lead VMS architect and engineer) and Stan Rabinowitz put together an elaborate April fool's hack. On April 1, the 11/730 in the VMS group's machine room had next to it a pedestal with a sundial on it and a ribbon cable leading into the 11/730, with sales brochures placed next to it. The sales brochures announced the SD730 Fixed Head Solar Horologue, a sundial with a photocell for detecting noon that could be used to automatically set the 11/730's time-of-day clock. The thing actually worked--it was connected via a UNIBUS real-time device controller, and Hustvedt had written a VMS device driver for it. All VAXen after the 11/730 had TOY clocks. -Paul W.