time zone survey

[Vic Abell]

In message <9306110028.AA22772 at bossie.nci.nih.gov> you write:
>Time zone abbreviations that are guesswork are:
>
>	DST	Daylight Saving Time?

I believe this is Dansk Summer Time.

>	EMT	?

I believe this is a Norwegian time zone.  I can't expand the acronym.

>	MEWT	?

I believe this is Middle European Winter Time.

>	NDT	?

I believe this is Newfoundland Daylight Time.

>The results make me think there's little prospect of discovering useful
>time zone information (in particular, time transitions that don't already
>show up in tzdata93c.tar.Z) from running through news articles; someone
>with an account on a site that does extensive archiving of news might prove
>me wrong.

I did a similar scan of mail headers a few years ago with the same confusing
results.  Among other causes for the large variety of abbreviations, it seems
to be the practice at BITNet sites to create local time zone abbreviations.

I have a list of my results if anyone is interested.

Vic Abell