From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Wed Aug 20 2003 - 00:25:41 EDT
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Raymond Mercier wrote:
> At some time in the 70's when I was at conference to mark the centenary of
> the Greenwich meridian I learned that the French agreed to give up the Paris
> meridian if the British agreed to go metric-and that was over a century ago
> !
I have no idea whether that's the same conference, but in early 1970's
it's also decided that the abbreviation 'GMT' would be deprecated
and 'UTC' should be used in its place. It's regrettable that a lot of
otherwise well-I18Nized/standard-conforming programs/libraries still use
'GMT' in place of 'UTC'. (BBC is free to use GMT, but GMT is _different_
from UTC). Note that UTC is neither an acronym for English (it'd have been
CUT although UTC can be argued to represent 'Universal Time Coordinated')
nor French (TUC), which was likely to be a part of the 'deal'.
> Maybe the U.S. could be bribed to go metric if they were allowed to have
> Washington as the standard meridian.
At least, there are two (or more) of the most accurate atomic clocks
near Washington (NIST and USNO) that 'weigh' heavily in 'coordinating' UTC :-)
Jungshik
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