09/10/01: For immediate release
Keywords: UNIX one billion second gigasecond
In the first decade of the new millenium, UNIX will flex its muscles and prove its superiority yet again. In a little over two years, UNIX will be one gigasecond old. That's right, the big Two-E-Thirty.
The UNIX epoch dates from January 1st, 1970. Every UNIX system in the world worth its salt keeps track of time by counting every single second since the midnight just before that auspicious date. And soon, they're all going to hit a gigasecond. Because for some reason largely lost in the mists of time, UNIX uses a signed 32 bit number for that date, this means that the most significant bit will have just flipped. This bit hasn't changed since the very first UNIX kernel ran on a PDP at Bell Labs. But on January 10th, 2004, UNIX clocks worldwide will clean the cobwebs out of the top of the word they use for holding the clock, and fill the 30th bit with nominal positive voltage (or alternatively, ground bit 30 on inverse logic machines).
Electromagnetic Networks is pleased to present the Countdown to One Gigasecond. Freely available for all to see is a counter, updated every second, clearly showing exactly how long you have before you ought to go find a UNIX box and pat it fondly on the corner for being such a beast as to have gotten to a gigasecond.
It took no little effort for Electromagnetic Networks to pioneer this development. After the events of the S1G Weekend, the engineers had to be bailed out of the drunk tank, and the resulting expense nearly drained the coffers of Electromagnetic Networks. Already weakened by the failure of our IPO due to interference from the engineers, the prohibitive bail imposed by the judge for "repeat offenses and behavior more appalling than any previously witnessed" came close to pushing the Networks into the pit of Chapter Eleven. To add insult to injury, the engineers refused to tell upper management the meaning of "Countdown to the Lass Bapf" until they agreed to consider bail as a research expense.
We briefly considered asking sysadmins what they were going to do on this upcoming milestone, but after the lackluster response from the previous survey, we decided to just poll our engineers. Dmitri responded immediately, almost before the question was completed. "I'm going to spend it drunker than I've ever been!" Considering his previous attempts to surpass this personal record, we at Electromagnetic Networks look at this claim with a little doubt, and considerable fear for the state of the Laboratories should he succeed. Nikolai was somewhat more reserved in his plans. "I am going to personally drink every drop of Gin in the Laboratories. Even the bottle that Dmitri thinks he has hidden inside the coolant tank of the air conditioner." Unfortunately, at this point a fight broke out between the two lead engineers, and our surveying was cut short.
Even non-engineers will be getting into the spirit of the occasion. Although the event occurs shortly a little after 8:37 AM on East Coast of the US, where Electromagnetic Networks is located, it will be a fine time to practice drinking gin before noon to the west of Greenwich. On a more global scale, universities worldwide will have just reopened their doors, after adding massive quantities of data on new students to their UNIX systems, and students will be hitting the bars to recover after the first week of classes. And also to celebrate the gigasecond. In fact, a significant percentage of the world will be celebrating the gigasecond. After all, it's going to be on a Saturday that this event takes place, so it'll be a party night. You can count on that.
We at Electromagnetic Networks would like to point out that although this date will mark the end of the first half of the expected lifetime of UNIX, there is little cause for concern. Two to the thirtieth seconds may be an impressive amount of time to have existed, but there's no reason it should be different than any other day. When this date rolls around, we hope that you will join us in welcoming UNIX into the second half of the epoch.
UNIX will finally use up all available bits in on Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 UTC. Hopefully, the ANSI spec will redefine time_t as unsigned, or as a 64-bit number, before then, or adequate windowing code will be retrofitted to existing applications.
yup
by pedro () on 10/13/2001 at 09:05 (#1)
oh wowsey wowsey
1 Gigasecond counter
by Baloo Aus Denderloo (baloo_racing@hotmail.com) on 11/25/2003 at 16:09 (#2)
Well, it will be close to my 78 th anniversary! it will be fun to see what will happens ! long live to electromagnetic laws!
Baloo Aus Denderloo
Happy Birthday UNIX!
by Rob () on 12/11/2003 at 17:00 (#3)
I could swear it just the other day UNIX was just one megasecond old. *sniff*
Wrong epoc...
by Correction () on 12/31/2003 at 12:57 (#4)
Actually Unix dates are based on seconds since midnight Januuary 1st 1900 (not 1970 -- that's the DOS was of doing things if I recall correctly).
On January 4th 2004 at 5:37:04 pacific time we'll use the last second up in the 30 bit space and roll into 31 bits. Apparently some Unix varients (particularly Sidewinder firewalls?) may have a problem. Patches are supposed to be available.
Re: Wrong epoc...
by ColonelNorth () on 01/03/2004 at 07:21 (#5)
Uh, wrong, friend. Try reading man.
System Calls time(2)
NAME
time - get time
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <time.h>
time_t time(time_t *tloc);
DESCRIPTION
The time() function returns the value of time in seconds
since 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970.
If tloc is non-zero, the return value is also stored in the
location to which tloc points. If tloc points to an illegal
address, time() fails and its actions are undefined.
<snip>
That seems to point to the article as accurate.
-CN
Total Comments: 5
All comments are owned by their author. All other content is copyright ©2000-2008, Electromagnetic Networks
Comments on this Document