Keywords: Life Sciences, NIST, USNO, US Naval, Standard, Atomic, Clock, Day, Call, Dial, Modem, DOS, Adjust, RighTime, TimeGen
Type: Shareware
Changes in V7.21: Enhanced to work with several non-standard modems, and several minor enhancements to increase accuracy even more.
TimeSet has been evolving steadily ever since the first version was released in the summer of 1987. That version and several subsequent ones could only set a computer's clock from the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington, D.C. Version 6.00, released in 1990, added ability to use telephone time signals from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, making it the first program of its kind able to address more than one atomic time service. This made it possible for computer users in the eastern and western United States to keep down long distance bills by choosing the time service closest to them. Version 7.20 continues that evolution with a number of new features and supporting utilities:
TimeSet can now access five atomic clock-based telephone time services on two continents: the USNO and the NIST in the United States, as before, and atomic time services in Sweden (Swedish National Time Service), Austria (Technical University of Graz), and Italy (National Electrotechnical Institute). People in European countries who want to set their computers to an atomic clock no longer need to make a trans-Atlantic phone call. In addition, to these formal services, TimeSet 7.20 can access any number of services that use TimeGen, a companion program in this package that generates time data strings in Naval Observatory format.
TimeSet is designed to interact closely with versions 2.53 and 2.54 (or later) of RighTime, the excellent memory-resident regulator for computer clocks developed by Tom Becker of Air System Technologies, Inc., Dallas. (RighTime 2.54 is also available online.) RighTime learns the drift rate in the computer's clock and continuously applies a correction to compensate for it, and it refines the correction each time the computer clock is set. A computer with RighTime installed and trained can maintain system clock accuracy within a second or even a fraction of a second for at least a week. Furthermore, versions of RighTime later than 2.53 provide true 0.01-sec resolution in the DOS clock, in contrast to the normal 0.055-sec resolution. This allows greater accuracy in PC clocksetting than ever before, indeed the maximum accuracy that can be obtained with a computer clock. Life Sciences Software and Air System Technologies cooperated closely during the development of TimeSet 7.20 and RighTime 2.5+, with the result that TimeSet can access several RighTime functions directly.
In addition to the ability to address five official atomic clock time sources on two continents, users of TimeSet 7.20 can get time from Life Science Software's program TimeGen version 3.1. TimeGen, part of the TimeSet 7.20 distribution package, is a program that generates time data strings for Universal Time using the Naval Observatory's format. Its purpose is to allow one computer in a local system to get accurate time from an official service, then share it by telephone with many other computers in the local system, in effect making the TimeGen-equipped computer a "substation" of an official atomic time service.
