FWIW.
Ref: US Naval Observatory - Universal Time "Historical Note." Yes, I realize I'm being anal , but ....
On web pages I write, I use either "UTC" or "UTC (GMT)."

I agree, but many mail servers still use the convention "GMT", and I don't program any of them.

Also, pedanticist to pedanticist, you misspelled "changing" in the Topic Title. <weg>

OIC [oh, I see] ... the timezone list came from another server? Fair enough!



<eerie music> Are you sure?</eerie music> -- Ya got me! <BLUSH>

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/faq/vmsfaq_003.html#time12

The results of an international compromise---though some would say an international attempt to increase confusion---UTC is refered to as "Coordinated Universal Time" (though not as CUT) in English and as "Temps Universel Coordinné" (though not as TUC) in French. (No particular information exists to explain why UTC was chosen over the equally nonsensical TCU, according to Ulysses T. Clockmeister, one of the diplomats that helped establish the international compromise.)

Universal Time UT0 is solar time, UT1 is solar time corrected for a wobble in the Earth's orbit, and UT2 is UT1 corrected for seasonal rotational variations in rotation due to the Earth's solar orbit.

GMT---Greenwich Mean Time---is UT1. GMT is the time at the classic site of the since-disbanded Royal Greenwich Observatory; at the most widely-known tourist attraction of Greenwich, England.

UTC is based on an average across multiple atomic clocks, and is kept within 0.9 seconds of GMT, through the insertion (or removal) of seconds. In other words, UTC matches GMT plus or minus up to 0.9 seconds, but UTC is not GMT.

Further discussions of history and politics, the Royal Observers' outbuildings, and the compromise that left the English with the Time Standard (the Prime Meridian) and the French with the standards for Distance and Weight (the Metric System) are left to other sources. Some of these other sources include the following URLs:

* ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/
* http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/time.html
* http://nist.time.gov/

Do we have another VMS Bigot here at spamcop? I thought Larry and I were the only ones

You must have missed the last infomal survey in the newsgroup, there are far more VMS people on spamcop.net than 3. And I am sure that not all of them have made themselves known.

It is not a matter of being a bigot, it is simple economics.

Working on OpenVMS has been earning my living for quite some time, but that it mainly because I have worked in areas where the computers were not allowed to be down.

Since OpenVMS licenses including compliers and many other products are free for home hobby use, it allows me to have a stable base for a home computer network.

I'm another VMS bigot... But I don't see the connection to this topic, since VMS internally uses Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory time and doesn't maintain UTC unless you explicitly ask it to.

Just the link to the VMS FAQ.

I'm just about on the Greenwich Meridien in London. The Beeb, as you might expect, uses GMT, though their credibility has been called into question via the Hutton report. Anyhow, UTC, TUC, GMT, 0 hrs - diversity makes life more interesting!

I prefer Z, but I don't think that's an option.

JT

Zulu, got to be Zulu.

It's Zulu for the military and for pilots.

It's GMT for the British.

The French bureaucracy hates the British (wanted the prime meridian moved to Paris), so refuses to allow "GMT". They will allow the letters U T and C in any order you like.

I'm not often in enough of a hurry for that 0.9 second to make a lot of difference. Microsoft hasn't been able to synchronise my PC clock in years (so the error log tells me) but it's still within a minute or so.

Not disbanded, merely -
mv observatory herstmonceaux
(a place in Sussex away from the bright lights [literally ] of London.


Difficulty of using Zone time is lack of a reference point. That was the reason for defining a 'prime meridian' back in the days of sailing ships. I think it was in deference to the English who did the work on calculating time at sea (Well the government set up a competition, then one of the competitors was on the board of judges!! - read Ms Sobels excellent book 'Longitude' if your are interested in the history).