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Remembering the HP-2000/A timeshare midnight rollover [message #403420] Thu, 31 December 2020 08:21 Go to next message
David LaRue is currently offline  David LaRue
Messages: 7
Registered: July 2012
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Junior Member
Hello,

During High School we had access to an HP-2000/Access timeshare system. I
found that the system time wrapped oddly on New Year. It rolled over to
December 32 of the same year. The System Operator had to manually update
the date at the start of the new year.

Were there other systems that didn't handle December to January rollovers?

Happy 2021 everyone!
Re: Remembering the HP-2000/A timeshare midnight rollover [message #403434 is a reply to message #403420] Thu, 31 December 2020 14:03 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Charlie Gibbs is currently offline  Charlie Gibbs
Messages: 5313
Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
On 2020-12-31, David LaRue <huey.dll@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> During High School we had access to an HP-2000/Access timeshare system. I
> found that the system time wrapped oddly on New Year. It rolled over to
> December 32 of the same year. The System Operator had to manually update
> the date at the start of the new year.
>
> Were there other systems that didn't handle December to January rollovers?

Hell, early versions of MS-DOS didn't even handle midnight rollover
reliably. A 10-line BASIC program that shows date and time whenever
either one changes would produce output with various combinations of
some, all, or none of the following, depending on version, machine,
and probably phase of the moon:

12-24-1985 23:59:58
12-24-1985 23:59:59
12-24-1985 24:00:00
12-24-1985 00:00:00
12-25-1985 00:00:00
12-25-1985 00:00:01

Been there, done that, wrote nasty code to deal with it.

Fred Brooks, in _The Mythical Man-Month_, describes the decision to
omit code that handled February 29 in leap years, to save 100 bytes.

> Happy 2021 everyone!

Same to you.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | "Some of you may die,
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | but it's a sacrifice
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | I'm willing to make."
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)
Re: Remembering the HP-2000/A timeshare midnight rollover [message #403901 is a reply to message #403434] Thu, 07 January 2021 16:56 Go to previous message
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