[time-nuts] 20th year of time nuts mailing list
Bob Albert
bob91343 at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 1 05:50:27 UTC 2021
Great job Tom! It's an important service you have here and for me at least, an irreplaceable resource. I have learned more than I thought possible and a good part of the blame rests on your shoulders.
Keep up the great work, and happy new year!
Bob K6DDX
On Thursday, December 31, 2020, 09:15:36 PM PST, Tom Van Baak <tvb at leapsecond.com> wrote:
Hello time nuts,
Ah, it is 2021-01-01 (JD 2459215.5, MJD 59215) which is nice because
that means it's not 2020 anymore.
One reason I've been looking forward to 2021 is that it's now officially
the 20th year of the time nuts mailing list. So this is a note to say
*thank you* to everyone for making it so amazing over the years. I get
comments all the time about this mailing list; its depth, its high SNR,
its focus, its vast archive of quality postings, and especially, the
community that evolved around the list.
On the web the phrase "time nut" is now a proper noun, sometimes an
adjective, or occasionally a diagnosis or disease. Never in my wildest
dreams did I think any of this would happen. I thought my early interest
in nixie tubes, clocks, electronics, and precise timing might be a
passing phase, and that the frequency of eBay purchases would fade. But
no. This turns out to be an incredibly wide, deep, interesting, and
rewarding hobby. The mailing list started with 6 people (half of whom
are still active) and we now have 1850 members. [1]
Speaking of history, and also to put time-nuts into perspective, I'd
like to mention that leapsecond.com (tvb) and febo.com (jra) predate Y2K
(2000), wikipedia (2001), facebook (2004), youtube (2005), twitter
(2006), reddit (2006), iPhone (2007), duckduckgo (2008), gmail (2004,
2009), eevblog (2009), instagram (2010), snapchat (2011), outlook
(2012), and literally millions of other web sites and mailing lists.
When this all started for us it was WWV on short-wave, ACTS by phone,
Loran-C, GOES, WWVB, GPS, Win98, dial-up, and my search engine was
altavista.dec.com. It's scary to think how much has changed in 20 years.
Fun fact: I started leapsecond.com so I could post the results of a Y2K
Colorado visit to NIST. If the world was going to crash I was going to
be at ground zero, with a camera. [2]
Anyway, stay safe, stay healthy, stay timely. Here's to a new decade and
a happy new year to all of us.
/tvb
[1] http://leapsecond.com/time-nuts.htm#history
[2] http://leapsecond.com/y2k/
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