DEC Answers Leap Year Complaint (1983) | Hacker News Reader

DEC Answers Leap Year Complaint (1983)

www-users.cs.york.ac.uk

42 pointslelf10 comments

It's worth going up a level in the directory and poking around.

"24 interesting things that you learn about computers in the movies..." has become pretty outdated, but it's an interesting historical artifact.

Imagine balking at the idea that laptops could support video chat. https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/24.htm

Reminds me a lot of the Jargon File, and really just the silly humor that filled the early Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File

Susan Stepney, the page owner, has/had a fantastic personal library. As in, extra wings built onto her house just to hold more books. The site is a bit like an old book shop, as in you're never quite sure what you'll find on it!

I'm sure the typo is that lunar calendar is 354 days, not 364

Correct.

This is one of those times when, while trying to be funny, using the wrong one of "affect" vs "effect" really puts a ding in the credibility of the author.

Summary: won't fix - not a bug.

Modern UNIX does the Julian -> Gregorian transition in 1752:

    $ cal September 1752
       September 1752
    Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
           1  2 14 15 16
    17 18 19 20 21 22 23
    24 25 26 27 28 29 30

I’m pretty sure the TZ database takes this from the transition for English-speaking countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_ca...

Addendum to my previous comment, you can change this behavior with the -s option to `cal`:

-s country_code

Assume the switch from Julian to Gregorian Calendar at the date associated with the country_code. If not specified, ncal tries to guess the switch date from the local environment or falls back to September 2, 1752. This was when Great Britain and her colonies switched to the Gregorian Calendar.

Too bad DEC didn't live out the 20th century so that we could recognize how wrong they were.

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