[Info-vax] The dangers of extended uptime. Was: Re: swap and page files

[David Froble]

Paul Sture wrote:

> When I first learned that NTFS stores file dates as UTC I could 
> immediately see the disadvantages of VMS clusters across time zones.  

Ya know, nothing is ever perfect, and usually even worse at first.

When VMS was initially implemented, there were no clusters, and very 
rudimentary networking.  It's been a long time, but I'm not sure that 
ethernet was working in 1978.

It's sort of hard to prepare for something that doesn't yet exist.  No 
USB in 1978 either ....

No Y2K issues in 1978 either.  Not too many were worried about a 2 digit 
year.

Yeah, it would be a better approach to keep all dates and time in GMT, 
and have local offsets.  Don't know how hard it would have been to 
change VMS without breaking existing applications.  Not to mention 
applications that already took care of multiple time zones in the 
application code.

Thus the delimma of older software.  What to do when conditions change? 
  Can changes be incorporated without breaking things?  Or do you just 
say "bust everyone, this is the new way"?