Clock and date resetting to 1969??

[fryke]

Yep, your battery seems dead, then. I'd try taking it out, leaving it for a day or two and then put it in again, just to see whether it comes back alive. But if it's been deteriorating for so long, it might well just be dead. Replacements from newertech or fastmac should help.

As for the low disk space: Yeah, that _really_ makes a change in performance. Keep 2-3 GB free and it's much better already. There's some percentage rule floating around, but I'd simply keep as _much_ free as possible.

[sprale]

I have a dozen or so MacPro and PowerMacs in a domain environment, working from an Xserve. When an individual system has this issue while working on a server-based file, the file gets tagged with the date on the server. It's a battery issue on the workstation. The date seems to be an arbitrary one chosen at an early stage in Mac development, because I've seen this issue back in the beginning of (UNIX) OS X.

This is due to OS X's UNIX underpinnings. In UNIX systems, the time is internally represented as seconds elapsed since the stroke of midnight, 00:00 GMT, January 1st, 1970. To the nerds, this is known as the "UNIX epoch." If this counter gets reset to zero or somehow becomes negative, it's 1969 all over again as far as your computer knows.

To UNIX-based systems, they have difficulty dealing with any time before the epoch.

"This message indicates that the Time Of Day (TOD) clock reads zero, so its time is the beginning of the UNIX epoch: midnight 31 December 1969. On a brand-new system, the manufacturer might have neglected to initialize the system clock. On older systems it is more likely that the rechargeable battery has run out and requires replacement."

Has everyone forgotten about MacOS defaulting under similar circumstances to 1904?

[Giaguara]

Hi Sprale, good info but the thread is a bit ancient...
Not from 1904 though I have some files that I recovered from some old appleshare that I didn't bother to correct the date afterwards.

[TommyWillB]

Giaguara,

sprale meant Mac OS "Classic"...

I know this is pre-history for a lot of OS X users, but Mac OS did in-fact revert to 1904 when the battery died... Not to 1970 as our shiny "new" OS X 'nix does.

[nixgeek]

Yup, TWB is right. Whenever the PRAM battery would die on the Macs, Classic Mac OS would revert back to the year 1904.

[sprale]

Giaguara,

sprale meant Mac OS "Classic"...

It was never "Classic" to me! I kept my Quadra well past Y2K.

[Giaguara]

Well - I never run queries to see which precise OS those files had been once hosted in.
Probably whatever was the current when there were some Newton developer files...