JB>>> Sure, it works well enough for messages with a TZUTC kludge.
 JB>>> It is just that it would save the programmer some work if the
 JB>>> timestamp itself was in UTC.

 ml>> hehe, which programmer?? the one doing the message base code
 ml>> or the one doing the reader code? ;)

 JB> Both actually, since modern operating systems use UTC

i guess that depends on the definition of "modern"...

 JB> internally. The program that writes the message to the
 JB> messagebase needs to convert it to localtime and the program
 JB> that displays the message needs to convert it back.  But that
 JB> was of course not the case when the format was designed...

my first question is how does the OS know what to set gmttime to? AFAIK, it
cannot without some other setting like TZ and without being told if the
BIOS clock is running localtime or gmttime...

)\/(ark