How and or will this y2k thing affect our accuracy of keeping time or knowing the correct time? Out of time, Johan

-- johan (reisch@c-zone.net), September 02, 1998

Answers

I think I remember that the Bard, Shakespeare called it the Greenwich Whirligig...but maybe it wasn't him...Big Ben...which is really the Clock of St. Stephen, I'm not sure it is calibrated with the atomic clock at Greenwich. I do think there is some computer input there though....we need some British scientist types to fill us in....

Sun dial, any one? Heavy sarcasm masking anxiety. In my family I am the keeper of NON-linear time...who's in charge here?

-- Donna Barthuley (moment@pacbell.net), September 03, 1998.

After August 22nd, 1999, most of us won't know what time it is anyway! :->

-- Gayla Dunbar (privacy@please.com), September 03, 1998.

There aren't too many of us who know to need what time it is to submillisecond accuracy. GPS trouble may well upset computer systems configured so that GPS is their only time source, but for the vast majority of us we'll carry on using our watches and being accurate to a minute or two. End-of-worlders might like to buy up every working wind-up watch they see at junk sale prices; quartz watches will have their problems if batteries don't again become available within a year or two... but then don't most of us have our old wind-ups stuffed in a cupboard somewhere for sentimental reasons?

Most computer systems will fall back to their own quartz-based internal timekeeping if access to an external GPS or similar source fails. If so, most things won't be badly upset, at least not until 1/1/2000 when various Y2K problems with realtime clocks arrive.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), September 04, 1998.