Friday, February 13, 2009

Unix Time Stamp 1234567890

Today is a very special - or at least curious - date for computer programmers around the world.

Back in the days, they way they figured out to better store and track time was to implement a simple counter, the unix time stamp, that keeps track of the seconds ellapsed since the beginning of the Unix Era on January 1st, 1970.

That allows computers to easily sort and do math on time data.

Since then, that counter has been steadily increasing, a second at a time, until...

Well, today, February 13th 2009, at 17:31, that timestamp will be: 1234567890

As you'll be able to verify at:
UNIX TIME STAMP: 1234567890
DATE: 02 / 13 / 09 @ 5:31pm


As I said, just a "geek" curiosity. :)

On the other hand, when we get to January 19, 2038, things will be a lot more complicated, as the 32bit counter used for the timestamp will overflow and be unable to track seconds from then on.
But, don't worry, by then we'll probably all be using 64 or 128bit computer systems... ;)

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