Alright I'll ask the dumb question What happened on Jan 1 1601??? -Martin
probably lots of things relevant to the people at the time.
Of most interest to clocks is that by that day, the start of the seventeenth century, most of the western world had updated their calendars to adopt the no-leap-centuries-except-on-millennium rule that kept the wall time more in sync with astronomicial time. So if you ignore dates before 1601 you dont have to worry so much about when different countries skipped a fair few days to catch up.
Russia didnt adopt the (gregorian, right?) calendar till after the October Revolution, a revolution which took place in November as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
MS have a track record of doing odd things with date and time. Excel time fields used to begin at 00:00 on 1-jan-1900, but because the developers got the leap century rule wrong, its epoch was redeclared to be 00:00 on 31-dec-1899. For all dates after 1-feb-1900 these values are the same. Excel time fields survive as OLETIME, one of the COM datatypes you may still encounter.
We are nominally fortunate that they dropped OLETIME in the SOAP era, replacing it with xsd:dateTime. That format requires you to specify the timezone, yet because the .NET Date structure is like java.util.Date, a time_t with no timezone, they get it wrong and always assume local tz. so you cannot reliably send date & time across the wire using the SOAP datatypes, not between Java (whose Calendar class is TZ aware) and .NET.
-Steve
(trivia related to WGS-84 'gps time' and current UTC omitted)
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