[time-nuts] UTC in Windows, and dual-booting

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Tue Oct 13 23:10:13 UTC 2009


Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <1869.12.6.201.154.1255464072.squirrel at popacctsnew.quik.com>, "J. Fo
> rster" writes:
> 
>> To hear an Apple or a UNIX disciple tell it, Microsoft never does anything
>> right. The fact is, Windows made personal computing bloom.
> 
> They also created at lot of jobs in Seatle.
> 
> However, none of this has anything to do with timekeeping, where Microsoft
> clearly screwed up big time, by running the RTC clock on local timezone.
> 
> Their numerous other screw-ups with respect to time confirms that this
> is not just one time unlucky.
> 

Well, we should blame IBM actually. They put the Motorola RTC chip on 
their motherboards, wrote the BIOS routines for it and Microsoft just 
used what was there for the DOS IBM had contracted them to do.

Microsoft have obviously not seen any reason to change the basic 
configuration mode of keeping the RTC to local time, as this have been 
acceptable years before MS Windows 1.0 saw its light.

They did add SNTP support in order to support Kerberos for Active 
Directory. The original Kerberos support was broken relative to existing 
Kerberos due to various misstakes, but that problem seems to be solved now.

I'm no particular fan of their products, but I remember the bad old days 
and kind of recall some of the history.

Cheers,
Magnus




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