Tonight, Daylight Savings Ends - Change Clocks

This reminded me about an event during the early days of MicroSoft Windows. It may have been version 3.1, or the first version to include auto-reset of the clock at daylight savings change.

I had my computer on at the 'change hour' and it dutifully set itself back one hour. An hour passed, the O/S clock passed the same hour and sensed it should set itself back one hour which it did. Now, it was set back 2 hours. It would continue to to do this until the computer was shut down. This was happening all over the country and world; It generated a flood of error reports to MicroSoft. LOL

If you had your computer turned off over night, the next day when you started your computer, the O/S reminded you that it was changing the clock and all was well.

However, there was another O/S that permitted files with the same name that differed only by the date/time of creation. If a busy beaver was buring the midnight oil and creating files, for example, he could have written a file (ver 1) at 1:59 am, the clock then set back to 1:00 am. If version 2 of the file was created at 1:30 am and then, if the backup routine kicked in, the older version 1 of the file would be stored, not the new version!

Similar anomolies (other than daylight time change) could happen if the files were being worked on during a backup. The company I worked for solved their problem by shutting off all users during a backup.

Those were the days - Happy computing.