First computer with real-time clock?

Tom> On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 13:05, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Tom> But in the spirit of the times, does any hardware facility have Tom> any time-related side effect that could have been exploited to Tom> extract time from? (Besides the obvious calibrated-subroutine Tom> hack.) Or does the feature have to be explicitly a Tom> "time-keeping" hardware facility? Either would serve. But a software mechanism would be really unlikely in practice without something resembling a real OS, with an interrupt mechanism or some other way to do things periodically (as on the CDC 6000 series). As far as I can tell, the 650 had no such thing -- your application was the only thing running. In theory you could keeep track of time even though your code lives on a drum -- but in reality, how likely is an application programmer, especially a business data processing programmer, to want to deal with that kind of esoterica? paul