British Summer Time

This morning, I woke up early thanks to the sun shining through a gap in my curtains and filled the kettle. It is the first day of British Summer Time today, and as my coffee boiled I set the time one hour ahead on the analogue clock in my kitchen and looked forward to the lighter evenings.

It was a bright day in April and the clocks were striking one-eighth multiplied by ninety-six over two.

You would be forgiven for forgetting, or not even noticing, that today was the day the clocks spring forward, as most of our smartphones and most modern computers will automatically account for daylight savings time.

Those of us with a few retro computers in our collection would, however, spend some time today making sure that all our older devices are at the same time as the newer ones.

Setting the time on my BBC Master 128

The BBC micro has a battery-powered clock. It is advisable to change the batteries every couple of years, and certainly, check that they haven't leaked all over the inside of the motherboard during its time forgotten in your attic. The time is set via a simple BASIC statement, as shown.

Analogue clock for the BBC 128 Microcomputer (I actually use this quite a lot)

The disk utilities in DOS running on my IBM PS1

DOS has a similar command line, or you can use the utility built into the operating system.

Mmmm.... DOS!

Nothing says 'daylight savings' quite like an ASCII clock!

For RISCOS on my Raspberry Pi, I have a time setting utility that was originally built on the BBC Master. Here is it doing its thing.

RISCOS Raspberry Pi having the time set to match the PC shown above.

The Acorn Pocket Book II has an option in the 'Time' app to allow you to manually indicate summer time or not. Presumably, so you could set the time for any location on Earth. This may prove to be incredible foresight from Acorn if the United Kingdom chooses to abolish daylight savings in the near future, as I truly expect my Pocket Book to be soldiering on long after the modern laptop I am writing this post on has gone to the recycling plant in the clouds.

Well, that's all from my classic computer collection. This post was just an excuse to show off my various retro machines.

If you liked this post then there is a slim chance you would like this post about my thoughts on date formats and why you are probably getting them wrong, or this post about particle Art. Maybe you are just curious to know what this link does.