Re: [TUHS] Date madness

Arnold: ISTR that the vaxen did have such things. Or rather, I ran some BSD 780s for several years and I don't remember having to set the date / time every time I did a reboot. They sat in a data center, so I may have never done a cold boot from power on. It was a LONG time ago now, so there's undoubtedly lots that I just plain don't remember. ==== I believe all the VAXes had time-of-year clocks, though the implementation and the method of access varied from model to model. On `Big' VAXes, the clock was considered part of the console front-end, and accessed through the model-specific console scheme. MicroVAXes had no console front-end; I believe the clock was accessed through registers, but it was an off-the-shelf digital-watch chip with some funny format (separate registers for year, month, day, hour, minute, second). So they all had proper battery-backed-up clocks, but of many different types. It wasn't as simple as reading a single counter out of a register, sensible as that might seem. If anyone's really interested I can dig up details for the several models of Big and MicroVAX I dealt with; I still have all the code lying around. Norman Wilson Toronto ON