[LEAPSECS] Bulletin C and all that

[Steve Allen]

On Sun 2015-01-25T17:25:33 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ:
> Contributors to this list can always count on prompt fact checking ;-)
> That said, the IERS came later than that, didn't it?

Yes.  Pretty much the whole story of who did what,and who did not do
what, and when is in my web page timescales.html
It is pedantic to the point of being tiresome.

In this arena of history there is a lot that could be described as
people saying
    This is what I think they would have called it if only they had
    understood what they were doing at the time.
Applying a name after the fact is not the same as admitting what
terminology was actually in use at the time.

It is in this sense that the "right" time zones which are part of the
tzdata and tzcode of the Unix zoneinfo files merit the name "right".

A system clock set to the "right" number of seconds since the epoch
does not conform to any explicit standard for a time scale, but it
does conform to the actual number of seconds which have been broadcast
by transmissions which have followed CCIR and ITU-R recommendations.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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