The reason why the 1970-01-01 00:00:00GMT epoch stuck was they
made the counter 32 bits to fix the problem once and for all
(Source: Dennis Ritchie, at breakfast at USENIX ATC 1998 New Orleans)
I've heard roughly the same story from another Murray Hill-ite. What
I find surprising about it
quantity), counting in microseconds from 00:00 1-1-1900.
Sorry, I mis-remembered: 00:00 1-1-1901. The rationale for that
choice of epoch is interesting in itself: http://www.multicians.org/jhs-clock.html
ian
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I've heard roughly the same story from another Murray Hill-ite. What
I find surprising about it is that most of the people involved in
Unics, later Unix, had worked on Multics. Multics, at least by the
1980s when I was using it, represented time as a FIXED BIN(71) (ie a
double-word
Hal,
That same adjustment to TAI nicely shows up in this recent paper:
Developing a pulsar-based timescale
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.5285
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.5285v1 (PDF)
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out over the coming
years and decades. Think PDO (Pulsar Disciplined
