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Comment by fyrabanks | Hacker News Reader

Thank you very much; this is a very detailed post that covers several things I was wholly unaware of. One minor gripe:

> However, what's perhaps more useful is that the Navy continues to offer a telephone time service (202-762-1401) while NIST does not.

NIST also has a phone # service, but regardless, I'm struggling to think of a scenario where dialing a phone # would be more useful and/or accurate than any other method. I haven't called a number to set my clock since the '90s.

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NIST also provides "Automated Computer Time Service" [1] where you can call by modem to get an ASCII time code. It supports baud rates between 9600 and 300.

And the best part? It gets 2,000 calls a day.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/service...

> It gets 2,000 calls a day.

I would absolutely love to hear from these folks as to what these systems are.

This thread is a tad old now so this link is primarily for posterity, but I couldn't not share this elsewhere: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/f2i9s4/have...?

Can't edit the above comment now, but I just noticed the link got misinterpreted by an Arc bug - I'd rapidly copy-pasted "https...til_nist_has_run_a/?", the link had a questionmark on the end. So I'm not asking a question :)

Yeah, for some reason I thought the NIST had ended that service but evidently it hasn't. That's a bit amusing since there is discussion of ending the shortwave radio service which is significantly more important than the telephone service, although admittedly much more costly to maintain.

Fortunately, so far, WWV/WWVH/WWVB have survived the budget process despite a pseudo-decision having been made to end the service. We'll see how long that continues.

In the 2000s, we set clock from cable TV news channels that displayed time on-screen.

In the 80s we called POPCORN (767-2676) to get the current time.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/remem...

In the 80s it was also very common for local banks to provide a number that would provide time. It was also common for the sign outside the bank to have a clock attached as well. "At the tone the time will be..."

A somewhat surprising number of these services still exist, mostly just because it's very inexpensive to offer them now.

I remember doing this a lot as a kid! and was sad to see so many of them going away.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-aug-29-fi-lazar...

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