[Info-vax] boottime in the future

[Michael Moroney]

"Fred Zwarts \(KVI\)" <F.Zwarts at KVI.nl> writes:

>>Would this be explained by the TOY clock being erroneous at boot time ?

>I don't understand this. I always understood that VMS took the year from the
>SYS.EXE image file. The TOY (Time of Year) clock only supplied the time
>within the year. The SYS.EXE file is updated at shutdown with a SET TIME. At
>least, this was the case on VAX hardware.
>A problem with the TOY clock would result in being at most about one year
>wrong.
>This is more than one year, so it indicates a problem with the SYS.EXE time.
>Maybe, this has been corrected later with a SET TIME, so that on subsequent
>boots the time was correct again.

If I recall, the TOY clock is only good for about 500 days (it's more than
a year, less than two, anyway)  The system determines the current time
from a base time in SYS.EXE plus the current value of the TOY clock.  A
$ SET TIME command updates the base time in SYS.EXE as well as resetting
the TOY clock to start from the new base.

It appears that somehow, the base got set to an incorrect value and the 
TOY reset to the incorrect base.  Why? Who knows?