In message <20091010.102425.477146992....@bsdimp.com>, "M. Warner Losh" writes:
>Yes. The original time_t (and long before it) definition was a bit >vague. It was written as "Seconds since Jan 1, 1970 GMT," but in >practice it either had so large an error that the exact definition was >irrelevant, or it was implemented as POSIX time_t is today. Back then, the PDP's had a register that counted cycles on the mains which was used for timekeeping. At least anectotal evidence indicates that in several geographices the first handful of leap-seconds were "smoothed out" in the mains, because synchronous motor clocks were in widespread use by the power-plants. In the nordic net-group, all leapseconds in the 1980'ies were done this way in the grid. Af that deregulation, and because of quartz-clocks, nobody thought it was necessary to make the number of cycles look right when measured over a year any longer. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
