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Re: unix time hits the bigtime
On Thu, 9 Jul 1998, Ira Abramov wrote:
> time on Unix machines is counted in seconds (I believe since 12am, January
> 1 1970), and today it turned 900,000,000.
>
> by a strange coincidance, it happend at exactly 9:00:00 Pacific time on
> the 9th day of July :-) (my local time)
real cute...
>
> as an aside: Unix systems are generally Y2K compatable since they only
> count seconds and not years, and it's mainly the applications that have
> problems (my favourite Email program, PINE, just came out with a Y2K fix
Pine 4.00 has much more than just y2k fix, it "knows" what HTML is and can
launch a browser, should handle MIME better. and has some more new
features.
> this week). Unix time is defined as a long int (31 bits and a sign bit on
It was changed (or at least going to be soon - I'll have to check how
time_t is defined)to a 63 + sign bit - on Linux (and I'm sure that other
Unices will follow this), which gives us another 92271023017 years. I'm
sure that by then the human race will come up with something better then
Unix.
> "but by then Unix will die out ofcourse,
> and if it won't, then this (the y2k+38 bug) should finally do the trick"
> (famous last words, by Ben Shelef)
Liran.
---
http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~liranz/