[geeks] You know you're an OpenVMS fanatic...

[dave at cca.org]

david at cantrell.org.uk writes:

>On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 03:21:20PM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 03:15:23PM -0400, Ross Alexander wrote:
>> > You know what happened on November 17, 1858.
>> What happened?

>Beginning of time.  VMS uses 1858-11-17T00:00:00Z as its epoch, which is, I
>think, the day that the US Naval Observatory was opened.

It's something more bizarre than that, and something only astronomers
know about. I don't remember the exact details, but it's days since some
ancient astronomical event, modulo a billion or something.

>Because unlike DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY it is unambiguous.  VMS predates
>ISO 8601 so we'll let them off for having their local standard varying
>from the proper notation.

I like YYYY-MM-DD because of endianness and sorting.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org -------
---------- "Anything Jesus can do, I can do better." - The Locust ----------