[HECnet] SimH, Ultrix and DECnet

[Mark Benson]

On 28 Jun 2012, at 14:45, Peter Coghlan <HECNET at beyondthepale.ie> wrote:

I've booted both VMS and OSF/1 or Tru64 or Digital Unix or whatever it is
called this week on the same Alphaserver 2100. The oses use the TOY clock
differently unfortunately.

When VMS notices that the time is "preposterous" is prompts me to enter the
correct date and time before allowing the machine to boot. Unix gives me the
"preposterous" message and advises me to fix the clock later while going on to
boot and put "preposterous" dates on various files :-( The VMS approach can
also be somewhat inconvenient when trying to do "lights out" operations.

A pity that a standard way of using the TOY clock could not have been agreed
for all the oses supported on a particular processor.

The DEC 'Enter date and time DD-MMM-YY (later YYYY) HH:MM' prompt
pre-dates VMS, it is also present in several PDP-11 OSs (because many
PDPs didn't have a TOY clock). I think it was DEC's defacto way of
handling the date issue that got handed down to VMS.

-- 
Mark Benson

http://markbenson.org/blog
http://twitter.com/MDBenson