AT&T and the Pope

Well, look at that.

$ cal 9 1752
September 1752
S M Tu W Th F S
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Why .. it's missing a whole chunk of days! The explanation ...

The guy that originally wrote the "cal" command on some old Version 7 machine had an off-by-one error in his code. This showed up as some erroneous output when a malloc'd variable overwrote 12 extra bytes with zeroes, thus leading to the strange calendar output seen above.

Now, nobody in his right mind really cares about the calendar for September 1752. Even the *idea* of the year 1752 does not exist under UNIX, because time did not begin for UNIX until early 1970. As a result, nobody even knew that "cal" had this error until much later. By then there were thousands of copies of "cal" floating around, many of them binary-only. It was too late to fix them all.

So in mid-1975, some high-level AT&T officials met with the Pope, and came to an agreement. The calendar was retroactively changed to bring September 1752 in line with UNIX reality. Since the calendar was changed by counting *backwards* from September 14, 1752, none of the dates after that were affected. The dates before that were all moved by 12 days. They also fixed the man page for "cal" to document the bug as a feature.

The 11 days from September 3 to September 13 were simply gone from the records. They searched the history books and found that fortunately nothing of much significance happened during those 11 days.

Wow - AT&T had some pull, back in the good old days.