From the I may never need this but it’s still interesting pile: “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database”

Jon Udell - A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database

“You will probably never need to know about the Olson database, also known as the Zoneinfo or tz database. And were it not for my elmcity project I never would have looked into it. I knew roughly that this bedrock database is a compendium of definitions of the world’s timezones, plus rules for daylight savings transitions (DST), used by many operating systems and programming languages.

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What I didn’t appreciate, until I finally unzipped and untarred a copy of ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2009o.tar.gz, is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two.

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But look at the rules for Feb 9 1942 and Aug 14 1945. The letters are W and P instead of D and S. And the comments tell us that during that period there were timezones like Eastern War Time (EWT) and Eastern Peace Time (EPT). Arthur David Olson elaborates:

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The tz db/file is an acquired taste and one that most will never need to acquire. I’ve known about it for a few years, yet never knew ,or groked, the details Jon provided. Pretty interesting in a academic kind of way.

Given the US time change this past weekend, this quote made me chuckle, “Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin in his whimsical essay, ‘An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light’…”

(via Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database)