Unix Epoch Time Trivia

[Patrick Wallek]

On Friday, Feb. 13, 2009, at 23:31:30 UTC the Unix epoch time was: 1234567890

I had never thought about this, but it is an interesting string.

Some web sites that talk about this event:


http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10163129-235.html

http://chris.pirillo.com/where-were-you-at-1234567890-unix-epoch-clock-time/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

http://digg.com/programming/Unix_Epoch_Time_of_1234567890_on_Valentines_Day_2009

And a whole lot more if you just google 'unix epoch time 1234567890':
http://www.google.com/search?q=unix+epoch+time+1234567890&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Patrick:

I missed that! Thanks for sharing. It fits right up there with the post Y2K worry of the epoch reaching '999999999' on Sun Sep 9 01:46:39 2001.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Avinash20]

Excellent !! I never knew about that..
I will share this thread with my complete team.. :)

[Avinash20]

Am enjoying with epoch..convertor !!

http://www.epochconverter.com/

[Bill Rothanburg]

I rolled my own converter in perl a long time ago...

---cut here---
#!/usr/bin/perl

require 'ctime.pl';


print &ctime($ARGV[0]);
---cut here---

[Bob E Campbell]

A small crowd watched the magic second pass here in my cube. When I tried to explain the magic moment to my non-tech family via Facebook .... lets just say it did not go well ;-)

We had a similar event when we hit the halfway point...

[Patrick Wallek]

>> lets just say it did not go well ;-)

Hmmmm......Yes, I can imagine! Most people I know, even some of the tech folks I work with, wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about if I tried to explain this unique occurrence.

[Mark McDonald_2]

Cool - missed this, and I was writing a script that used epochs last week too.

Thanks

[Jan van den Ende]

Well, this _IS_ restricted to Unix variants!

The VMS world lives by a totally different base_time, and maybe it is somewhat better known under its StarTrek name:

the base for VMS time is the same as that for STARDATE. Both have time-zero in november 1848: the Smithsonian base for astronomical time.

.. at least it is "somewhat" easier if you have to register eg peoples birthdate.
For most participants in this forum I assume even their own birthdate in Unix is non-trivial.

Something akin to the millennium problem or the 2037 Unix overflow _IS_ going to occur in VMS as well, when the 100-nanoseconds counter overflows 128 bits.
I do not yet worry too much: that will be in over 29000 years.

fwiw.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe