alt Hacker NewsIn 1974 when I was an medical intern at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Hospital, ALL the round analog wall clocks with hands in all 26 operating rooms were correct six months a year: there was NO provision for automatically advancing/moving them back when DST started/ended, nor did anyone do it manually.
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I remember in my elementary school the clocks were all synchronized to a system somewhere, presumably in the head office. The day after going back to school after a DST change the clocks would all be off by an hour and sometime in that morning they would all suddenly freeze, then fast forward or rewind an hour and then restart. In retrospect it is amusing that whomever was in charge of updating the clocks didn't do it when they first got in but waited until the school day had started.
It's crazy they didn't have a centralized clock system in a facility like that. What a thing to scrimp on.
I worked in a Network Operations Center in the early 1990s, and there was a large projection display with four other monitors around it. Across the top were four round analog clocks, representing the time zones of the United States. I was one of four operators, all in our 20s.
So, Daylight Savings Time ended, and the early-morning operator had all the clocks set by the time I arrived, and the third operator came in, looked at them, and said "Great! So, did you take all four of them down and adjust the time individually?" "Yeah" "Didn't think about taking one off the end, adjusting it, and moving the others down the row?" *facepalm*
I was told by our school electrician that long ago the clocks were adjusted by the power company. So around 2am DST they would either send power at 59Hz* to fall back or 61Hz* to spring forward. This was from the era when power grids were separate and analog. With newer national grid-tie it might not even be possible to do now.