Re: en vlsmakande liten bit
By: Michiel van der Vlist to Kurt Weiske on Sat Mar 25 2023 07:40 pm
Hello Kurt,
On Saturday March 25 2023 09:29, you wrote to me:
I'm surprised Fidonet didn't specify UTC (or some USA time zone) for all of Fidonet, given the ZMH requirement back before continuous mail was possible.
I will go further than that: the founding fathers made a serious mistake by using local time instead of UTC - or GMT as it was called back then. There has always been a large overlap between the HAM community and the Fidonet community. When I became a HAM in the early sixties of the previous century HAMs already used GMT when logging contacts and exchanging QSL cards. It makes sense when using a medium that does not stop at national borders and time zones.
While it may not have been clear that Fidonet would quickly become a global thing, it would have been clear that it was never limited to one time zone. And while Tom Jennings was not a HAM (AFAIK) my intelligent guess is that by the time Fidonet had reached 50 nodes, about half of the sysops were HAMs and it would not have been too late to make the change from local time to GMT.
Each message can specify the date/time and zone which can be converted to/from UTC if desired by the receiving system. If the sender prefers, they can just use UTC (which I agree, should have been the assumed-default when no timezone header was included).
Like NNTP articles, it's really up to the sender as to how they want to represent the date/time of the message they're sending, but it should always be easily converted or compared with a local timezone of a reader.
--
digital man (rob)
Rush quote #71:
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