The Bell Labs people who originally developed UNIX were in the US and were thinking in terms convenient to North American locations (i.e., a positive integer value representing minutes west of GMT made sense because all of the US is west of Greenwich). By the time anyone dreamed that Bell Labs' modest creation would give rise to a family of OS'es that would one day span the entire globe, the original time zone sign convention was cast in concrete, and no one dared try to change it to something that made more logical sense for fear of breaking countless existing applications that depended on that early decision made by a handful of American developers in the early 1970's. Traces of the confusion which UNIX created over the time zone sign issue can probably also be seen in RFC 822 (the 1982 Internet e-mail format standard), which allowed the conventional one-letter military time zone designators but mixed up their meanings by getting the signs wrong. Rich Wales richw@richw.org http://www.richw.org