John Cowan said: >> Fact 2 is that the old 1980s pre-POSIX Unix manuals talked about GMT and >> not UTC. This strongly suggests that the authors were unfamiliar with >> both TAI and UTC. The "seconds" they refer to behave more like UT1 >> seconds than like TAI/SI seconds, i.e. they are Earth rotation angles >> and not Caesium oscillations. > Where do you see any reference in the old documentation to the rotation of > the Earth? The authors of those man pages were engineers, and they knew > perfectly well what a second was and is (since 1967), and they certainly > knew the difference between measuring/counting and encoding.
I was around, though on the margins, when the first POSIX standard was being written. If there had been an awareness of the difference between UTC and GMT, I am the sort of person who would have leaped on it in an attempt to win a Weirdnix prize. I offer this as weak evidence in support of Marcus - nobody was discussing stuff at this level of detail. -- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138 Internet Expert | Home: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | |
