From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2018 11:15:19 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP In-Reply-To: <20171231234728.GA6542@wopr> References: <20171231231022.CDC7218C09C@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20171231234728.GA6542@wopr> Message-ID: On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Kurt H Maier wrote: > I am confident ARPANET did not pin time to AEDT. Even if you go by UTC > you've still got about fifteen minutes to wait for 1 JAN 2018. So am I, but what reference *am* I supposed to use, FFS? The USA is several zones behind UTC[*], and almost a whole day behind Australia (where I live). My "on this day" policy is to use the local time if it can be narrowed to a particular zone where the event happened (and if it makes sense); if it was universal e.g. moon landings then I'll use UTC; otherwise I'll use the commonly-observed date e.g. the start/end of the world wars. I'm open to suggestions (including FOAD, in which case I'll simply find something better to do). [*] 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). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."