[HECnet] How long has your 20 been up?

[Thomas DeBellis]

Good point, and so I reveal my age and travels.  I picked up GMT during 
my visits to England eons ago where the BBC would use the term on BBC 3 
LW and International.  Old habit...

I think Tops-20 still prints it as GMT.

If you run the TIMCHK program as a regularly scheduled, self-submitting 
batch job (which I do), then this will pull the correct UTC time from 
NIST and so that situation is addressed. There is also a lightweight 
version of NTP that I have been thinking of porting to the 20.

As an American, one thing that had always impressed my about Tops-20 was 
the table driven approach that MRC had come up with to address daylight 
savings time.  During the oil crisis and onward, this turned into a bit 
of a moving target and Tops-20 handled it years before other operating 
systems did.

Of course, you just never know what a congressmen is going to do and I 
don't think it impossible that this could turn into another political 
football.  it has concerned me that the code, while table driven, is 
hardwired into the monitor.  I think a better safer approach would be to 
have in a configuration file.

As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if some uninformed 
zealot tried to legislate Julian time.  In the 1800's, one of our state 
government legislated the 'exact' value of π\pi, so you never know...

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 1/20/22 12:20 PM, Peter Lothberg wrote:
>
> GMT is solar time! (and not used...)
>
> The world uses UTC that is TAI with compensation with leap seconds to 
> deal with earth rotation speed not being constant.
>
> While you are on it, make Tops20 do leap-seconds correctly.
>
> And then we want "syn-cookies".
>
> -Peter
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>     *From: *"tommytimesharing" <tommytimesharing at gmail.com>
>     *To: *"hecnet" <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
>     *Sent: *Thursday, January 20, 2022 12:02:53 PM
>     *Subject: *Re: [HECnet] How long has your 20 been up?
>
>     ...
>
>         The machines simply never stayed up that long.
>
>     That being said, Yes, there are some things that have struck me as
>     surprising or perhaps unfortunate.  Or perhaps it is more accurate
>     to say that they just annoy me.  For example, the TIMER module has
>     the so-called limitation of clamping elapsed time and specific
>     time requests to 35 bits, giving you the previously mentioned
>     issue with millisecond uptimes, but also limiting time of day
>     requests to 27-Sep-2217 23:59:59 GMT, instead of the actual ending
>     time of 7-Aug-2576 23:59:59 GMT, some 358 years later.
>
>     I do plan some enhancements to TIMER%, such as retrieving the open
>     timer requests for a fork, so perhaps I will revisit my feelings
>     about the matter.  Some of the code for CPU limits suggest some
>     interesting enhancements.
>
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>         On 1/18/22 2:15 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>             On Jan 18, 2022, at 2:05 PM, Thomas DeBellis
>             <tommytimesharing at gmail.com>
>             <mailto:tommytimesharing at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>             ...
>
>             I wrote TIMET2 because I needed to know when to set a
>             shutdown. If you don't do that and you hit the uptime
>             limit, then the machine simple crashes with an UP2LNG BUGHLT.
>
>         Oops.
>
>             I know that XKL fixed at least part of the uptime problem,
>             but I don't remember what that limit is. What are the
>             limits for other systems?
>
>         It's not overly strange that designers of mainframe systems,
>         where planned shutdowns (say, for preventive maintenance) were
>         a regular occurrence) would overlook silly bugs like that. It
>         feels like the sort of thing that minicomputer software,
>         especially real time systems, would never do. For example,
>         RSTS has no uptime limit.
>
>         ...
>
>             paul
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.sonic.net/mailman/private/hecnet-list/attachments/20220120/776fc29c/attachment.htm>