On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Harold Ancell wrote:

[...] 

(when it's back on the air), that the GPS system uses a 13 bit counter for
days and weeks.  I think 10 bits are used for the week and 3 (obviously)
for the day of the week.  I.e. it can count up to 1024 weeks or slightly
less than 20 years, and then it starts over again.

What I know for sure is that this clock rolls over on August 22, 1999.
It will not have rolled over again by 2014, and that means the Evangelions
will have to guess---are they around 6 years in the future, or 14 years
in the past?

If the coders for the Evangelion computer system have their act together,
and expect the EVAs to last a few years (they don't know what Gendou/SEELE
knows...) they'll probably be prepared for roll over, and the EVAs will
interpret the date to be in the future.  If the programmers are lazy, the
EVAs will think it's the past....

Well, the rationalization that I use is that since they expected the evas
to run for a maximum of 5 minutes at a time disconnected from NERV's power
and signals umbilical, roll-over wasn't an issue. At least, not until
the internal clock reads 2019 or so.

Sigh... Esentially, the problem was I needed some way for them to find
their position, and from that also figure out the current year. And it's
gotta be up and running by 2000.

Tom