Hello Malcolm, Richard, Gordon, Bill, John, John, Fernando et. al. I must say that I track with pleasure this off topic subject. Yes, time was and is very emotional issue.
1. I would not worry about Internet Time, the name is a marketing trick. In reality time service on the Internet is taken very seriously these days. Most servers use internally UTC (GMT) and are synchronized through the net which is not that simple if you take into account variable route and time of arriving packets. Yet more or less it is done fine thanks to smart IETF engineers and few protocols they devised. Really important servers are synchronized by chips receiving time signals. The only operating system that took time seriously from the very beginning (early 70-ties) is Unix, which by default uses internally UTC. This by no means impedes the displaying of dates and times in proper local time for user convenience. Unix generally is not affected by the famous Year 2K problem however applications written improperly are. All Unix systems count seconds since Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC. Because many use 32 bits to store seconds count their final date falls somewhere in 2038. This is no big deal because 40 years is much too much time, at least for Linux hackers, to move the system to 64 (or more) bits processors. This is our luck that Internet is still based on Unix. Linux (free Unix) calendar program "cal" has range 1-9999 years. It does include the transition to Gregorian Calendar which in the British Empire took place in 1752. In Catholic countries the reform was introduced in 1582, as prescribed by Pope Gregory, and in Oct of that year 11 days were skipped. There were reports of rioting in many places as people believed that the Pope robbed them of 11 days of their lifes. 1600 was the first centurial year that was a leap year in countries that accepted the calendar reform in 1582. This is the output from Linux "cal" for Sep 1752 (Unix was originated on American soil so 1752 for skipping days is correct) September 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 The boldest reform of calendar was introduced during French Revolution and stayed quite long. If I remeber well the Gregorian Calendar was reintroduced by Napoleon in 1806, that is few years after his coronation and next year after Austerlitz. 2. Paris meridian, or rather opposition to Greenwhich Meridian, was still seriously raised on international conferences before the First World War. French lost the Prime Meridan finally but won meters, liters and kilograms, very useful BTW, not yet in the US. In order not to run out of causes for holy wars we should prepare new in advance. 3. Richard gave http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/information/html/time.html to search for explanation of times. I would add two more, at USNO and former Greenwhich Observatory (yes, it was closed in Oct last year) http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/systime.html http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/time/time.html The second link contains lots of other short leaflets which may be of general interest. To keep the long story short. In the past pendulum clock prooved to be more accurate time keeper than the Sun. This prepared the introduction of mean solar time. Today similar thing happened again because of atomic clocks. TAI is atomic time with its well defined second as number of specific oscillations of cesium atom. UTC uses same time scale or rate and two conditions must be met (*) UTC readings may differ from TAI by integer number of seconds (**) UTC may not differ by more than 0.9s from time UT1 determined by mean solar motion that includes some long range phenomena like motion of poles, et.c. Because of those two conditions UTC may be adjusted twice a year (Jun 30, Dec 31) and a leap second is used if necessary. Adjustments justify "Coordinated" in time name. Old GMT is more or less UTC. The name is seldom used outside UK now. Slawek At 04:17 AM 2/24/99 +0000, you wrote: >Dear John, John ,Troy, Fernando et. al. > >In my case Internet time is that time between 6pm(local) and 8am(local) >when the teleco charges are less per minute. >With prime surf-time being between midnight(local-civil)Friday and >midnight (local-civil)Sunday when the charges are least ( about a >loaf-of-bread per minute.) Regardless of when lunch-time is in the >big apple !! > >The bill that the teleco sends me each month is much more important >than any other Bill ! So watch-out anyone sending big attachments. > >Atleast the time on my dial is free. (see, I am trying to be on-topic!) > >Now to the point of this missive : >The last gasp of a dying ( u mean dead ) British empire is/was >GMT.(also dead). The UT thing is an international got-up consortium >thingy. Dont blame that on us English, please :-) we have enough crosses >to bear as it is. >I dont want to start another 100-year war <G> but when was the last time >you heard of the Paris meridian, >whoosh -->>> > >Have fun, >Malcolm. >in SW England, happily my ancestors are not English ! > >Fernando Cabral wrote: >> >> Phil Pappas wrote: >> >> > Hey, did anyone see the CNN story last night about the watch company >> > ,"Swatch" that is now selling timepieces which tell "Internet Time"? I >> > can't remember exactly, but they said one minute of normal time=about 1 1/2 > >ETC. > > Slawek Grzechnik 32 57.4'N 117 08.8'W http://home.san.rr.com/slawek