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Railroad "Time Zones" of the United States (1868)
- JohnMakin 3y agoI will never again complain about servers being set to timezones outside UTC and what a pain in the ass that usually ends up being.
- lxgr 3y agoWhat's so bad about servers being set to local time (assuming they're used by an organization contained mostly within a single time zone)?
- gymbeaux 3y agoIn that scenario, nothing is wrong
- JohnMakin 3y agoYou can always interpret the timezone on the app/client/presentation side, I can't think of any scenario that is made better by the server itself being set on local time zone. It causes extremely messy issues IME.
- toast0 3y agoDepends on the time zone and changes to it. If it's a timezone without seasonal changes and its other properties don't change during the life of the organization, that's fine; maybe it's not ideal, but it's fine. If it's a timezone that has its operational properties change, you have the potential for confusion where there is disagrement about when a given time happened or will happen; think about how fun it is when daylight savings rules change. Sometimes, although not really that often, a time zone's offset is simply changed; hopefully with warning, but maybe not. If the timezone has daylight savings, you get to deal with all the fun of most days having 24 hours, but some having more or less. If the organization moves to a new time zone, either because it physically moves or because the locality its in changes time zones for whatever reason, now you have a problem; it's not fun to deal with multiple time zones in server infrastructure, but now you have to pick if you want to move all the servers, move only some servers, or have your servers in a different time zone than your org. If the last option was fine, you might as well use a sensible timezone to begin with.
- Phrodo_00 3y ago1. If the time zone changes (like, as it's happened multiple times in my country, the date for switching to daylight savings changes) you have to make sure all your servers is updated with the change 2. Daylight savings mean that events an hour apart can end up having the same timestamp.
- lxgr 3y agoThese are both good reasons. I've fortunately never experienced (1), but for (2), it helps to print the offset to UTC everywhere timestamps are printed, even for UTC. (I basically never trust an "unzoned" timestamp.)
- hyperhopper 3y agoThe organization will grow outside of that time zone. And then migration will be infeasible and you'll be stuck with 2 timezones for everything. See: Google
- baq 3y agoI guess you’ve never had to correct the local time to UTC for handoff to a different system and the conversion was buggy in the wrong direction? Or haven’t had to figure out which 2:30am something happened? Or why something that usually takes a second took an hour?
- lxgr 3y agoI've had to do all of these things many times, but keeping server times on UTC doesn't really help with most of them: Customers, partners, stakeholders all think in terms of local time zones, as do I; some amount of conversion is inevitable. Ultimately, local time is a presentation layer concept, so why shouldn't I configure that presentation layer so that I have to do one less conversion in the most common case (of figuring out when something happened relative to my wristwatch or that of most of my customers)?
- JohnMakin 3y agoAre you saying you should configure the server to local time to save you one less configuration on the presentation layer? That doesn't make sense to me. I really can't think of any benefits to setting the server to local time that doesn't offset the huge load of negatives. Here's something you may not be thinking about - your presentation layer may save a configuration step, but now every system that interacts with your server (who have all likely defaulted to UTC) have to know about this now. Think - logging infrastructure, schedulers, cloud infra, etc. So now you have to configure all those as well. Anything that touches the host will need to be reconfigured to save one very minor and commonly done thing on the presentation layer. Really doesn't make sense, as an infra guy.
- lxgr 3y ago> every system that interacts with your server (who have all likely defaulted to UTC) have to know about this now. No, why? Almost all APIs/interfaces use zoned timestamps or seconds since the Unix epoch. The argument of “servers must run in UTC” sounds a bit like “servers must run with an English locale” to me in that sense, as if the locale changed the name of API parameters or enum values instead of just human-readable strings.
- eric_the_read 3y agoI'm sure this gets recommended all the time, but "Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time" is a fascinating (to me anyway) story about the creation of time zones; how and why they came about.
- akira2501 3y agoHimself a railroad engineer and present at the driving of the "Last Spike." Quite the individual. I really do like the charm of "cosmopolitan time:" The zones were labelled A-Y, excluding J, and arbitrarily linked to the Greenwich meridian, which was designated G. All clocks within each zone would be set to the same time as the others, and between zones the alphabetic labels could be used as common notation. So for example cosmopolitan time G:45 would map to local time 14:45 in one zone and 15:45 in the next. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming
- Lammy 3y agoTIL why time zone offsets are often shown as "±(offset)Z" and that it doesn't stand for "Zone" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_time_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_time_zone
- Lammy 3y agoTrivia: notice how it lists Sacramento but nothing closer to the Bay Area. Old Sac was the terminus of the entire railroad as a connection with the Sacramento River waterway https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=38.5839%2C%20-121.5056#map=16/38.5839/-121.5058 https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=38.5839%2C%20-121...
- Miserlou57 3y agoShameless plug- Check out the Niles Canyon Railway (NCRy.org). It’s a volunteer organization that runs vintage trains (including steam engines) on the original connector route that was completed later in the year to finally connect the bay with Sacramento.
- SllX 3y agoThat does make more sense but my first guess was because Sacramento is the capital and close enough to San Francisco. I’m not sure that the Bay Area was particularly well defined yet either. Interestingly while I was checking the incorporation dates of Oakland and Brooklyn (now part of Oakland) I saw that 1868 is the year that Central Pacific Railroad settled on Oakland as the West Coast terminus of the first transcontinental railroad and bought the San Francisco & Oakland Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_and_Oakland_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_and_Oakland_Rail...).
- lolinder 3y ago> my first guess was because Sacramento is the capital and close enough to San Francisco That didn't stop them from independently listing Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus Ohio, all with different times (even though Dayton and Cincinnati are only 1 minute apart).
- SllX 3y agoIf what the parent said was correct, then it wasn't merely because Sacramento was the capital, so my first guess would be wrong under that criteria. And it makes sense they would list so many Ohio cities if major railroad hubs was the criteria. Ohio was practically the hub of the nation with major railroads running through all the cities you listed plus riverboats. California at this point was comparatively speaking still pretty much a backwater, even post-Gold Rush, and wasn't politically nor industrially significant before at least the first transcontinental railroad. No one in Congress had even worked particularly hard for the California EC votes until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
- dwighttk 3y agoI guess they were using local noon at this point.
- shagie 3y agoAnother document from a 1866 - The Johnson Chart of World Time Zones, from Washington --- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/1866_Johnson_Chart_of_World_Time_Zones%2C_from_Washington_-_Geographicus_-_TimeZones-johnson-1866.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/1866_Joh...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ambyra 3y agoI never got what different time zones was supposed to accomplish. Why doesn’t everyone just use GMT? Why does the clock have to say 8 when you go to work? Wouldn’t it be better if we used the same clock everywhere?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoA lot of us expect that "noon" has some connection to "sun at its highest point in the sky". Having that happen at 10 PM just feels wrong. But in fact, the military does have one standard time - Zulu time. Why have so many time zones? Well, they were originally introduced by railroads in the 1880s. Back then, "noon" was defined as "highest sun", so deviating very far from that was unreasonable. But also, railroads didn't run very fast back then. Each time zone was something like 700 miles across. That was enough to give enormous operational improvements. Removing the transitions (going to all one time zone) would have added only a little additional improvement.
- jameshart 3y ago"the military does have one standard time - Zulu time" Nah they don't. Skipping over the (common on the internet) parochiality of assuming that US military practice is just 'what the military does'... The US military certainly uses UTC/Zulu time for time stamping messages and coordinating operations globally, and timekeeping during extended missions (like submarine patrols, or air missions), but military bases and even surface vessels underway keep somewhat local time. They don't use Zulu time - that would mean the date changes in the middle of the day. You wouldn't be able to use words like 'next Tuesday' without having to disambiguate. It'd be crazy. Zulu - Z - is just the last of the alphabetically named military timezones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_time_zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_time_zone, which is a NATO standard.
- bombcar 3y agoZulu is used for aircraft scheduling, because it makes it simpler. Outside of that, the military recognizes two times, zero dark hundred and late as hell.
- craigmcnamara 3y agoUtica, NY. A historically significant city.
- cwmma 3y agoSalem MA jumps out even more to me, these days it's only even locally significant in October.
- Animats 3y agoWhen Saudi Arabia built the world's largest tower clock (43 meter dials) atop a hotel in Mecca, the original plan was to sync it to solar time at Mecca, as a political statement. Fortunately, sanity prevailed. It's currently set to UTC+3.
- gdprrrr 3y agoI think it's interesting that they chose moon as the reference, as the AM/PM system is evitently most confusing at the 11 AM - 12 AM - 1 PM mark.
- martopix 3y agoConsidering we're talking differences of about 3 hours max, there's hardly the space for ambiguity.