more about time

[ESC@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Eric S. Crawley)]

    Date: Fri, 9 Mar 90 11:40:20 CST
    From: walls%ssl.span@Fedex.Msfc.Nasa.Gov (Bryan Walls--One cool froog)

    >>>>From: ESC@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Eric S. Crawley) 
    >>>>When booting at a non-standalone site with a non-embedded system, a
    broadcast 
    >>>>will be made on the primary network (Chaos only for pre-8.0) for the time
    of   
    >>>>day.  Since the primary network can only be chaos before 8.0, only lispms
    will
    >>>>respond.  The responses to the broadcast are collected and the median time
    is 
    >>>>chosen for the status line time.  If the broadcast fails to get any
    respons
    >>>>pre-8.0 machines would give you a nasty prompt in the cold-load asking you

    >>>>type the time.  In 8.0, this has been changed so the calendar clock will be

    for
    >>>>the time is when the calendar clock is broken or uninitialized.  After t
    >>>>machine is booted the time is kept by the software.                        
    This makes the autoboot feature pretty useless in 7.2 then, right?  I have
    a 3650
    display.  It's set up for autoboot so that if there is a power glitch, we could
    start recording again ASAP.  The power went off yesterday, and when I checked
    this morning, the machine was waiting for the time to be typed in.  Am
    I missin

No, you are not missing something.  Most serious users of autoboot in 7.2 have
some sort of patch built into their to eliminate the query.  This is one of
the reasons the query was removed in 8.0.