As this Tech Time Warp is being written, the current Unix epoch time is 1770344462.
That means one billion, seven hundred seventy million, three hundred forty-four thousand, four hundred sixty-two seconds have passed since midnight GMT Jan. 1, 1970 (not counting leap seconds).
The layperson may think this is the most useless bit of trivia ever, but in fact, Unix time is the backbone of Unix and Unix-like systems and many modern applications. Developers use it for its simplicity—no time zones to manage, just a continuously increasing counter.
The origin of the Unix epoch
Engineers chose January 1, 1970—known as “zero time” or the Unix Epoch—as a simple starting point, not because it held any special significance in the Unix world. Unix itself had been around since the late 1960s, developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. In 2001, as Unix time neared 1 billion seconds (a milestone reached on Sept. 9, 2001), Ritchie explained to Wired that the engineers had decided they needed to stop “changing the origin of time,” so they picked “one thing that’s not going to overflow for a while.”
A milestone engineers never expected to matter
And while Unix time is still not going to overflow for a while, the potential for the “Year 2038 Problem” is closer than one may realize. On Jan. 19, 2038, 32-bit systems will reach the maximum value for a signed integer, which means on such systems the Unix counter will either reset or overflow. That could result in systems resetting to December 13, 1901.
The cleverly named Epochalypse Project is dedicated to raising awareness about the Year 2038 Problem and points out that even 64-bit operating systems may have a single layer using 32-bit time, making them vulnerable to 2038, with risk particularly high in legacy infrastructure (think industrial controls, transportation systems, building management, etc.). Consider this your 12-year warning.
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Photo: Ink Drop / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.