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CBC stops broadcasting reference time signal after 80 years.

I happened to catch this announcement this morning during a rare moment of listening to the radio.

Dan Taekema with CBC News:

For more than 80 years the beeps and tones of the National Research Council (NRC) time signal have connected Canadians at exactly 1 p.m.

… Monday marked the last time it was broadcast, ending the longest running segment on CBC Radio.

Apparently changes to the way broadcasts are executed potentially reduced the timing's accuracy, and the signal will still be available on the Web.

The rest of the article is about people's fondness for the tradition. Noteworthy that one of the station's most mechanical features became so evocative of warm feelings.

There's no shortage of dramatic headlines in recent years, but it feels somehow like few things say more about a changing culture than a shift of a humble but unflappable signal from one medium to another after most of a century.