GetTickCount vs. clock for msec resolution

[Bengt Richter]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:30:44 -0700, Tim Roberts <timr at probo.com>
wrote:

>"Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> wrote:
[...
>For those of who might not know the derivation of that number, it's an
>interesting study in how a convenience can become encoded as history.  When
>IBM was building the original IBM PC in 1980, their charter was to produce
>it as cheaply as possible with as many off-the-shelf components as
>possible.  They needed a motherboard clock of some kind for timing.  Well,
>the most common crystal in the world at the time (and probably now, too!)
>was the 14.31818 MHz crystal used in television flyback circuits.  This was
>a little fast for their purposes, so they passed it through a divide by 12
>circuit.
>
>14,318,180 / 12 = 1,193,180, and the rest is history.
The TV connection was interesting new info for me.
As you know, a little arithmetic shows where that silly almost-55 ms
tick comes from too -- count to 2^16:
(1/1193180)*65536 = 0.0549254 sec, for 18.206482 hz.