@petealexharris @EricLawton @futurebird @cohentheblue @yurnidiot
Have you read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge?
The spaceship in that book is called the Qeng Ho, one of the main characters is a "software archaeologist" and he describes the system clock as:
a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon.