>> Marketing reasons. The original Pilot design had to be competetive with
>> comparable products of the time. Those products could store tons of
data
>> in a small amount of space. The Pilot had to be able to make the same
>> claims. Thus, date information was packed into a two-byte field: 5 bits
>> for the day, 4 for the month, and 7 for the year == 16 bits.
>
> as per my previous post..
Well, we tied. I posted before yours showed up in my queue.
>> (Another mistake was storing the date as day/month/year, when simply
>> storing "number of days since 1904" as a 16-bit field would have yielded
a
>> range of 179 years.)
>
> i still believe it was to synchronize with the UNIX date system
> failure..
Well, that's where you're wrong. I work at Palm and you don't, so I can
ask the right people as to why there's that 128 year range limit. Beside,
your assumptions and math were wrong in your post. First of all, there's
no date function, there's a time function. Second, the UNIX time function
returns the number of *seconds* since 1/1/70, not milliseconds. And third,
that brings you to the year 2038, not the year 2031.
> i guess as soon as they figure something out regarding UNIX, they
> will replicate it with the Palm?
UNIX has absolutely nothing to do with it.
-- Keith
