I know this is not the proper forum for this message. I lack sufficient contacts to send this idea to. So I provide it to you here. There are /so/ many people (influential and otherwise) on this list that seeding this proposal here seems like the best way to do it. I apologize now if you feel I am abusing the IETF mailing list. We currently (normally) store time as the number of elapsed seconds since January 1st 1970 GMT. The resolution of time_t is poor. Given the high speed applications we use today, timing based on time_t is next to impossible. I have a solution. Make time_t 64 bits wide. Make the most significant bit (bit 63) a sign bit. Make the next 50 significant bits store the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st 2000 GMT. The last 13 bits be of fractions of a second. This method would make it EASY to make a clock chip. It need only operate at a clock pulse rate of 8192 cycles per second (2^13.) With 2^50 seconds storage you can date documents, artifacts and files (forward and backward, thanks to the sign bit) up to ~35,628,841 years. Of course the significand (the 50 bits) need not be this wide. We could shorten it and add the bits not used to the fractional part of time_t to increase resolution. What do you think? Sincerely, Chad Christopher Giffin a.k.a. "typo" _________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf