[LEAPSECS] Do good fences make good neighbors?

[Ian Batten]

>

> 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 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 quantity), counting in microseconds from 00:00 1-1-1900.   
It was explicitly signed, so it could handle dates tens of millions of  
years in each direction.  It needed microsecond resolution, if not  
accuracy, because the clock was locked so that no two processes could  
obtains the same timestamp and therefore it could be used directly to  
produce unique strings.  For this reason the clock also had to be  
monotonic, which made for entertainment every autumn, as although the  
OS supported timezones being different for processes, it didn't  
support summer time correctly.

ian