Re: Weird IIgs Rom 01 bug

[Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net>]

In article <7Fudd.185329$as2.2670@bignews3.bellsouth.net>,
 "Jayson Smith" 
 <nospamratguyspambegone@nospamplease.bellsouth.ihatespam.net> wrote:

> Hi again,
> That's pretty much what I finally figured out.  But just one question.
> 1904?  Why 1904?  If they'd gone with the Unix epoch of 1970, we'd at least
> be good until somewhere around 2106 or so.

Well, for the "why 1904 instead of 1900" part, that was one of those 
"fewer bytes of code" things - setting up the epoch such that 1900 
doesn't exist means not needing to do a couple of steps in the "is it 
leapyear?" calculation. At least, that's the reasoning I remember 
reading long long ago and far, far away...

As far as why they didn't use the Unix epoch... <shrug> Ask Steve and 
the rest of the crew at Apple Inc. 

I've got a feeling it all comes down to the whole "think different" 
concept that was driving Apple - 'The other guys' do it this way? OK, 
that method is out. Find some other way to do it so we're different from 
'the other guys'.

They also didn't use the "normal" methods of doing internet stuff (which 
we now call "sockets") until MacOS X was released. Prior to that, it was 
either MacTCP (a nightmare of non-portability) or OpenTransport (an even 
worse nightmare than MacTCP), which I personally believe is one of the 
reasons (along with pricing) they lost so much market share once the 
internet took off - It's POSSIBLE, with a huge amount of effort, and a 
learning curve that's damn close to straight up, to write TCP/IP 
applications under MacTCP or OpenTransport, but doing so basically means 
that porting from any "normal" OS (meaning one that uses the pretty well 
standardized "sockets" API) to Mac requires a MASSIVE rewrite of nearly 
the entire program, rather than just tweaking Mac-specific stuff, 
recompiling, and having your "written on Unix/Windoze/whatever" program 
be ready to roll without basically starting from scratch.

-- 
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