2 ms·

With hindsight, we'd do lots of things differently :) I guess they just didn't foresee the problem, or misjudged the impact. I can imagine it being very "let's

• wat10000 2y ago
  UNIX systems at the time probably didn’t care about accuracy to the second being maintained over rare leap second adjustments. Random example, the wonderful RealTime1987A project (https://bmonreal.github.io/RealTime1987A/ https://bmonreal.github.io/RealTime1987A/) talks about detecting neutrinos from the supernova, and what information can be inferred from the timing of the detections. A major source of that data is the Super Kamiokande project. The data was recorded to tape by a PDP-11, timestamped by its local clock. That clock was periodically synced with UTC with a sophisticated high-tech procedure that consisted of an operator making a phone call to some time service, then typing the time into the computer. As such, the timestamps recorded by this instrument have error bars of something like +/- one minute. If that’s the sort of world you’re in, trying to account for leap seconds probably seems like a complete waste of effort and precious computer memory.