[LEAPSECS] presentations from AAS Future of Time sessions

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sun Jan 12 05:58:40 EST 2014


In message <52D257B6.6090900 at edlmax.com>, Brooks Harris writes:


>> But time_t has always been UTC, because it was meant to be UTC.

>

>Oh, I see what you're saying. Of course - UTC in the historical non-Leap

>Second period existed, and they intended time_t to reflect it.


Nice try to twist things to your own viewpoint, but you are wrong.

They meant UTC to be UTC.

They had absolutely no opinion on leapseconds.

Leapseconds, UT, UT1, UT2 or for that matter astronomers or their
opinions about time, played absolutely no role in the decision
making process.

Bell Labs were a telco-sidekick and the telco business used UTC
to isolate local timezones and DST issues to a presentation issue.

Do I need to remind you that it was telcos caused UTC to be CCITT
business in the first place ?

Appearantly the only computing person outside timelabs who cared
about leapseconds prior to 1985 was Dave Mills.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at 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.


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