Good morning everyone, and what a lovely start to the new year it is, because it’s your birthday! Happy birthday, it’s your 50th! What’s that you say, you aren’t 50 today? (Looks…) That’s what all these internet databases say, because you’ve spent the last decade or so putting 1970-01-01 as your birth date into every online form that doesn’t really need to know it!
It’s been a staple for a subset of our community for years, to put the UNIX epoch, January 1st 1970, into web forms as a birth date. There are even rumours that some sites now won’t accept that date as a birthday, such is the volume of false entries they have with that date. It’s worth taking a minute though to consider UNIX time, some of its history and how its storage has changed over the years.
Don’t Use Up That 32 Bit Int Too Quickly
How do you turn a 1960s minicomputer into a clock? Digital pdp8f.jpg: Simon Claessen [CC BY-SA 3.0]
Most readers will be familiar with the UNIX timestamp that the date command will return on UNIX-like operating systems. It’s an integer value representing the number of whole seconds that have elapsed since January 1st 1970, and it’s easy enough to write a little script that scrolls it up the screen so you can watch it increment second by second. But the interesting things about it are that the epoch date preceded its inception by several years, and the earliest UNIX versions used a rather different timing system.
We’re used to gen ..
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