Subj : en vßlsmakande liten bit
To   : Michiel van der Vlist
From : Rob Swindell
Date : Sun Mar 26 2023 08:06 pm

  Re: en vßlsmakande liten bit
  By: Michiel van der Vlist to Kurt Weiske on Sat Mar 25 2023 07:40 pm

 > Hello Kurt,
 >
 > On Saturday March 25 2023 09:29, you wrote to me:
 >
 >  KW> I'm surprised Fidonet didn't specify UTC (or some USA time zone) for
 >  KW> all of Fidonet, given the ZMH requirement back before continuous mail
 >  KW> was possible.
 >
 > I will go further than that: the founding fathers made a serious mistake by
 > using local time instead of UTC - or GMT as it was called back then. There
 > has always been a large overlap between the HAM community and the Fidonet
 > community. When I became a HAM in the early sixties of the previous century
 > HAMs already used GMT when logging contacts and exchanging QSL cards. It
 > makes sense when using a medium that does not stop at national borders and
 > time zones.
 >
 > While it may not have been clear that Fidonet would quickly become a global
 > thing, it would have been clear that it was never limited to one time zone.
 > And while Tom Jennings was not a HAM (AFAIK) my intelligent guess is that by
 > the time Fidonet had reached 50 nodes, about half of the sysops were HAMs
 > and it would not have been too late to make the change from local time to
 > GMT.

Each message can specify the date/time and zone which can be converted to/from UTC if desired by the receiving system. If the sender prefers, they can just use UTC (which I agree, should have been the assumed-default when no timezone header was included).

Like NNTP articles, it's really up to the sender as to how they want to represent the date/time of the message they're sending, but it should always be easily converted or compared with a local timezone of a reader.
-- 
                                            digital man (rob)

Rush quote #71:
He's not concerned with yesterday, he knows constant change is here today
Norco, CA WX: 54.9øF, 44.0% humidity, 0 mph ESE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs

.