50g Warmstarted in the future!

[TravisE]

No idea if this could possibly have a connection of some sort, but I seem to recall experiencing some interesting quirks in system clock behavior upon battery removal. I thought I recall observing once that after brief removal of main power (AAA-cell or USB) and reconnection the clock (and return value of TICKS) continue running normally, but if power is removed for long enough (somewhere around a minute or so, I think) it seemed like the clock was somehow reverted to a state near the moment when AAA power was removed and then froze there until power was resupplied… or something along those lines. But I just tried that on my old HP 50g now and could not reproduce the behavior I thought I remembered. After several minutes without power, the clock was still okay.

But now here's the weird part. When I reinserted the battery, the calculator for some reason immediately did a warmstart, which was unexpected. Normally removing and reinserting a battery when the calculator is off does not trigger a warmstart. Then, I checked the WSLOG and got this entry:

C-11/07/18 18:15:59

It is currently 2018-11-04 18:32 as I write this, and I confirmed the clock was correct when I did the test (and it still is). So now *I* have a WSLOG entry in the future! But in my case, I have no alarms set, so apparently no relation there.

I wonder if there is a hardware clock that can get lost on power loss but then is somehow restored later during bootup (by some sort of “backup” clock, maybe?). Maybe the “future” WSLOG times are some sort of side effect of this happening? In particular, I wonder if the datestamp listed in the WSLOG in this case doesn't in fact correspond to the time at which the simulated Saturn CPU happened to next be scheduled to “wake up” and perform the next time-based task at the point when the power loss occurred.