From dattier@gagme.chi.il.us Sun Feb 2 16:23:27 1992 From: dattier@gagme.chi.il.us (David W. Tamkin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: cal: what's wrong with year 1752 Date: 31 Jan 92 22:28:51 GMT Organization: Gagme Public Access Hermitage, Chicago, Illinois 60656-1252 poulson@cs.widener.edu (Joshua R. Poulson) wrote in : | In article | xiaoy@bullet.ecf.utoronto.ca (XIAO Yan) writes: | >Can anybody enlighten me as to what's special about the September 1752, | >as far as `cal' command is concerned? | > S M Tu W Th F S | > 1 2 14 15 16 | >17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | >24 25 26 27 28 29 30 | | That's when some high record-keeper in the Catholic Church updated to | calendar to correspond for various astrological and religious events. | It corrected the calendar to correspond to holidays falling on the | correct days. Close; in *1582* the *pope* declared that October 4 should be followed by October 15 to skip ten days and get the calendar back in line with *astronomical* events. Further, century years were no longer to be leap years unless they were divisible by 400. The Julian calendar, by having too many leap years, was just too long and already ten days over. This adjustment got *solstices* and *equinoxes* on the correct dates and thus date-based holidays back to their proper relationships to the solstices and equinoxes: for example, Christmas was occurring too long after the solstice and in fact after perihelion. So why September, 1752? Protestant countries didn't go along at first, so the UK didn't convert until 1752. Whoever designed the cal program decided to use the calendar in effect in Britain and its possessions (which, at the time, included what would become the USA and Canada). In the meantime, 1700 had been a Julian leap year but not a Gregorian leap year, so the difference had grown to eleven days. (That's why September 3-13 are missing.) When the fledgling USSR converted in the early twentieth century, they were thirteen days off and found that their October Revolution had taken place on Gregorian November 7. | I could look this up, but I'm unsure of more than the fact that it was a | guy named Gregor and that's why it's the Gregorian Calendar. It was a guy named Ugo Buoncompagni, better known as Pope Gregory XIII, who gave his papal seal to the results. | Isn't history neat? In those days it was rather sloppy and unsanitary in comparison to modern times. David W. Tamkin Box 59297 Lincolnwood, Illinois 60659-0297 +1 708 518 6769 dattier@gagme.chi.il.us CIS: 73720,1570 MCI Mail: 426-1818 +1 312 463 2670
Archive for the ‘software’ Category
The Calendar Gap
August 5, 2008Origin of POSIX
August 5, 2008From jsq@longway.tic.com Thu May 3 19:16:29 1990 From: jsq@longway.tic.com (John S. Quarterman) Newsgroups: comp.std.unix Subject: Re: Answer to "what does POSIX stand for?" Date: 2 May 90 18:17:10 GMT Reply-To: std-unix@uunet.uu.net From: John S. Quarterman In article From: Don_Lewine@dgc.ceo.dg.com: >From the Rationale and Note section of IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 section B.1: > >"Since the interface enables application writers to write portable >applications -- it was developed with that goal in mind -- it has been >dubbed POSIX, an acronym for Portable Operations System Interface. The >name POSIX, suggested by Richard Stallman, was adopted during the printing >of the Trial Use Standard." At the time, the official name of the proposed standard was IEEE Standard Portable Operating System Environment, or POSE. Thus POSIX was a fairly obvious pun to produce something that sounded and looked similar to UNIX. The official name of the standard has changed several times since then (it was at one point Standard Portable Operating System for Computer Environments, or SPOSCE, and the name on the cover of the Full Use Standard is IEEE Standard Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments, or SPOSICE), but the name POSIX has stuck. Could have been worse: there exist bound draft copies of the Trial Use Standard that say IEEEIX on the cover.... >"... The term POSIX is expected to be pronounced pahz-icks, as in positive, >not poh-six, or other variations." Note that this assertion appears only in the rationale and the foreword, not in the body of the standard. This is because the committee could not standardize a pronunciation, and in fact had no consensus on what it might be. Nonetheless, there is a small clique that considers it their duty to enforce what they regard as the correct pronunciation, even though they don't all pronounce it the same way themselves. Volume-Number: Volume 19, Number 98
Origin of USENET
August 5, 2008From zed@mdbs.uucp Fri Aug 10 18:31:03 1990 From: zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: origins of news Date: 7 Aug 90 23:06:20 GMT Organization: mdbs, Inc. >From: smb@ulysses.att.com (Steven Bellovin) >Date: 25 Jul 90 20:06:47 GMT > >Back in the days of 6th Edition UNIX, there was a program called >``news''. I'm not sure where it came from, but messages were >restricted to 512 bytes. Login was hacked to check if you had >unread news, and told you to read it. > >When we upgraded to V7, no one wanted to carry forward such an ugly >program, but some replacement was needed > >Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, then of Duke's Computer Science Department, >conceived of the idea of a network news system. They and I, and a >few others, got together and designed netnews -- i.e., the network >news system. I'll omit a detailed discussion of the history; however, >we planned to announce it at the Winter '80 USENIX meeting. USENIX >had just received its name; it had been called the UNIX Users' Group, >but AT&T's lawyers didn't like that. When the new name was announced, >at the Summer '79 conference, it was met with some hoots of derision -- >the form of the name was felt to be in violation of the spirit, if >not the letter, of trademark law. (That is, if one cannot use X in >a name, why is f(X) legal?) Nevertheless, a precedent had been set >within the community, so we used g(f(X)) to generate USENET -- we >envisioned that it might become the ``official'' network of USENIX. > >As for msgs and news -- I believe that msgs existed at Berkeley at the >time, but we had neither seen nor heard of it. I had heard vague >rumors of the Bell Labs news program (the one that used 14-character >file names as article titles, and stored them in /usr/news), and in >fact my very earliest prototype of netnews (a Bourne shell script) >used the same technique, with one vital difference: an article could >be linked into many subdirectories of /usr/spool/news, thereby >permitting multiple newsgroups. Subscription lists were in the >environment variable SUBSCRIBE; the script used the shell's file name >expansion to construct the actual list. > > > --Steve Bellovin Wasn't there a precursor to netnews on PLATO? I almost certain that PLATO is the origin of "talk" and "write". Bill Smith sawmill!mdbs!zed
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