In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type.
TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format we still know and love today. The first TIMESTAMP column in a row also got automatically updated when you changed something in a row, so we ended up switching them from TIMESTAMP type to text strings and just filled out the initial values on the PHP side. We could have used DATETIME but that would have been a slightly harder transition at the time, and would have introduced the fun of the server settings trying to give you local time half the time... -- brion On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:39 AM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia > time? When was this, and what was the thought process? > > (the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the > obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.) > > > - d. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
