[HECnet] How long has your 20 been up?

On 2022-01-18 20:15, Paul Koning wrote: Ooops indeed. This is a bit of a surprising limitation in Tops-20 for me. Neither have RSX. However, I do know that VMS have an uptime problem. Or rather a time problem. Because of the way time is represented, everything will fail catastrophically somewhere around the year 31000. VMS represents time as a signed quad. 100ns resolution, and offset from 1858 (or whenever it was). Anyway, the important bit is that it is signed, and it has to be positive. Because negative time values are considered to be relative (delta) times. And so, when the time actually wraps over, things will go totally bonkers in VMS. Of course, other things will probably start causing problems long before then, like when years start needing 5 digits... With RSX, I am not aware of anything that will cause fatal problems. Time representation might get a bit broken around the year 33000 or so, but I don't think anything catastrophic will break. Years are just a 16 bit value with an offset of 1900. But very few things even use it for anything, except printing it out. So signedness or not might cause things to look funny depending on the code, but most software itself will not care. Various subsystems will probably have issues long before then, like time stamps on files will wrap, queue manager time handling will break/wrap, and of course DECnet time representation can't deal with it. But the OS itself will probably just continue chugging along, as will most software. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol