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From: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64 bits for times....
Message-ID: <1990Aug23.153624.2702@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Aug 90 15:36:24 GMT
References: <11187@alice.UUCP> <2506@dino.cs.iastate.edu>
Reply-To: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK
Lines: 18

In article <2506@dino.cs.iastate.edu> hascall@cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall) writes:
>In article <11187@alice.UUCP> andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
>}that VMS (i think) has some funny date like 1858 as its epoch, the so-called
>}smithsonian time.
>
>   VMS keeps time in 64 bits (really 63, negative times are "delta times"), 
>   in 100 nSec units, since 17 Nov 1858 (when the calendar jumped 11 days?).
>
The VMS time base is Julian day 2,400,000. Julian day numbers have been
(maybe they still are) popular with astronomers.

The change from the Julian (different Jules, of course) calendar to the
Gregorian calendar happened in England and the American colonies from 
2-14 September 1752. I thought everyone knew that :-)

Chris Thompson
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