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| 14th January 2007 | A HISTORY OF BRIEF TIME |
Brian Grainger
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A little while ago I had a little rant about how the definitions of Kilobytes, Megabytes, etc. were being redefined by people who did not respect that they had already been defined by the early IT community. I have now come across a situation where the IT community are responsible for redefining units of time that the scientific community had defined a long time ago. Well, I say the responsibility lies with the IT community. In fact, it may be those guys who brought us that magical phrase, UK English, namely Microsoft! I am indebted to a Richard Rose, writing to 'Computing', that in the C# programming language the SqlDateTime structure has time measured in biliseconds. It's a wonder it was not billiseconds in order to immortalise their beloved leader! By referring to the web, see here for example, Richard determined that the meaning of bilisecond was an integer value representing a billionth of a second. Huh? We already have a name for a billionth of a second. Of course, we are not sure if this is a British billionth (1/1,000,000,000,000) or, more likely, an American billionth (1/1,000,000,000). The ambiguity could be resolved by using the definitions we already have, instead of inventing new ones.
This talk of small units of time reminds me of my roots in the early days of IPUG and the time unit on the PET and C-64 computers. On these computers the integral unit of time was 1/60th of a second. For some reason this was known as a jiffy - anybody know why? I suppose it could be linked to the phrase - I'll be with you in a jiffy! Why do IT people, including me, ALWAYS underestimate time duration and cost of projects! Perhaps it is because when we sit at our computers what seems like a minute is an hour of real time. No history of brief time would be complete without a reminder of the following units of time:
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