Plea to Microsoft to allow RTC=UTC

[Chris Sells]

What existing software will be broken if the CMOS keeps UTC instead of
local time? --Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk] 
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 9:06 AM
To: tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Cc: ulrich.windl at rz.uni-regensburg.de
Subject: Plea to Microsoft to allow RTC=UTC

I have managed to get someone inside Microsoft interested in the
problems of the old MS-DOS convention of keeping the RTC in some local
time that is not further specified in the CMOS RAM data. I was asked to
write up a case to convince Microsoft management to dedicate resources
for fixing this and enabling the Windows RTC driver to maintain the
battery clock in Universal Time instead of local time.

I just did so on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html

and I would like to invite all computer time gurus out there to review
this brief essay before I send it off to Redmond.

Please let me know if you have any further

 - arguments
 - technical suggestions/proposals
 - related references
 - URLs of well-documented RTC DST problem stories

that you think that whoever at Microsoft touches the Windows RTC code
next should be aware of.

Cheers,

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>