>     Two related questions:  First off, I presume there's some reason why
> NetBSD/i386 couldn't just keep the clock in the local time, and
> back-calculate GMT from it?
Maybe because the concept of "local time" is not very well defined?
What if I'm out travelling with my laptop?
No, the idea of having you RTC run on local time is, IMHO, so
silly that only Windoze could have come up with it (well, I guess
it predates Windoze).

   -- Lennart