William H. Magill on 7 Jan 2004 07:18:02 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] History is 1/2 over on Saturday


On 06 Jan, 2004, at 21:00, eric@lucii.org wrote:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 07:58:30PM -0500, Bob Schwier wrote:
Wow.
As I don't expect to be alive when Unix dies, my sympathies to you
young bloods.
bs

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Mark Dominus wrote:


Unix systems store times as the total number of seconds elapsed since
midnight, 1 January 1970. Typically, this value is stored as a 32-bit
signed integer, which has a range from -2147483648 to 2147483647.


This range extends to 22:14:07 on Monday, 18 January 2038, at which
time the universe will come to an end.

Next Saturday, 10 January, at 8:37:04, is exactly halfway between the
zero point in 1970, and the apocalypse in 2038.  At this moment, the
Unix epoch will be exactly half over.

Happy birthday!

Well, I'm not sure myself (2038 - 1953 = ... oh, nevermind) but since we have TONS of warning on this I suspect that the problem will be solved LONG before the date arrives.

As I recall, it was fixed long ago in all of the REAL 64 bit Unix implementations.


Yet another reason to go to 64 bits. ... not the "double 32" that a lot of vendors
have tried to pretend is a 64 bit implementation.


Think about it... The original Unix clock implementation was in 16 bits.
... and this weekend it dies! '

(Anybody still running Unix on a PDP 8 is in serious trouble... for many reasons.)

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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