Daylight Savings Time

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <641 at mit-eddie.UUCP> barmar at mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes:
>On Multics, the date/time conversion software includes a table listing
>many of the world's time zone names (in several languages, no less),
>along with the corresponding difference from GMT.  ...

Nice, but nothing special and not unique to Multics.  I had this
working on an old PWB 1.0 system quite a few years ago.

>                             -- the system administrators merely change
>the default time zone twice a year (if necessary -- our primary exposure
>system is in Arizona, which doesn't use DST).  Many of our customers are
>outside the US, so hardcoding our DST rules would have been a nightmare.

Many systems don't have system administrators (at least not ones who
are like you and me and know how to wreak magic), and so it is nice
if they automagically put in the correct times.  If there is a
computable algorithm, it can be expressed on the computer in some
simple form, even if only via numerical methods.

joe
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}