[tz] [PATCH] Introduce Epoch offset and local time Epoch

[Random832]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016, at 03:12, Guy Harris wrote:
> Most if not all UN*Xes, these days, run on hardware with some flavor of
> time-of-day clock that continues counting during a reboot and may even
> have a battery so that it continues counting even if the power is turned
> off, and a value taken from that gets used as the current time value. 
> It's been so long since I've used such a system - did we *really* have to
> log in as root and type the "date" command after a reboot if we wanted
> the system's clock to be sufficiently close to reality?)

I'm too young to know how things were on the ground for Unix systems,
but, PDP-11 Unix boots into a root prompt on the console and you have to
Ctrl-D out of the shell to continue to go on to multi-user mode, and V7
boot(8) mentions "doing any filesystem checks and setting the date" as
the purpose.

I do remember that on MS-DOS, the system automatically prompted for the
date and time after every boot, before giving you the command prompt.