[TUHS] Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Dave Horsfall]

https://www.timeanddate.com/on-this-day/september/9

``Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system 
  that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1, 1970, 
  not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001, Unix time 
  reached the billionth second timestamp.''

Hard to believe that it was that long ago...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Rob Pike]

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There was a delightful conference in Copenhagen celebrating that event, and
I was lucky enough to attend. The slides of my talk live here:
http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

I flew back the next day, September 10, 2011, and it was a beautiful clear
night with a stunning view of the city. We sat in the last row of the
plane, and had an unobstructed view of the trade towers as we landed near
midnight. We went home, fell asleep, and were woken by a phone call about
9am.

-rob


On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 8:29 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> https://www.timeanddate.com/on-this-day/september/9
>
> ``Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system
>   that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1,
> 1970,
>   not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001, Unix
> time
>   reached the billionth second timestamp.''
>
> Hard to believe that it was that long ago...
>
> -- Dave
>

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[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Dan Cross]

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On Thu, Sep 8, 2022, 7:50 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> There was a delightful conference in Copenhagen celebrating that event,
> and I was lucky enough to attend. The slides of my talk live here:
> http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf
>
> I flew back the next day, September 10, 2011, and it was a beautiful clear
> night with a stunning view of the city. We sat in the last row of the
> plane, and had an unobstructed view of the trade towers as we landed near
> midnight. We went home, fell asleep, and were woken by a phone call about
> 9am.
>

You probably flew approximately over me. I was working late that night in
downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the WTC, trying to get a demo working
on a Compaq iPaq running Plan 9 in preparation for a trade show in San
Diego a day or two later. That, of course, never happened.

        - Dan C.


-rob
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 8:29 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> https://www.timeanddate.com/on-this-day/september/9
>>
>> ``Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system
>>   that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1,
>> 1970,
>>   not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001, Unix
>> time
>>   reached the billionth second timestamp.''
>>
>> Hard to believe that it was that long ago...
>>
>> -- Dave
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Rob Pike]

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Oops, 2001 of course, but you knew that from multiple contextual clues.

-rob


On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 9:48 AM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> There was a delightful conference in Copenhagen celebrating that event,
> and I was lucky enough to attend. The slides of my talk live here:
> http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf
>
> I flew back the next day, September 10, 2011, and it was a beautiful clear
> night with a stunning view of the city. We sat in the last row of the
> plane, and had an unobstructed view of the trade towers as we landed near
> midnight. We went home, fell asleep, and were woken by a phone call about
> 9am.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 8:29 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> https://www.timeanddate.com/on-this-day/september/9
>>
>> ``Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system
>>   that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1,
>> 1970,
>>   not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001, Unix
>> time
>>   reached the billionth second timestamp.''
>>
>> Hard to believe that it was that long ago...
>>
>> -- Dave
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Fri, 9 Sep 2022, Rob Pike wrote:

> There was a delightful conference in Copenhagen celebrating that event, 
> and I was lucky enough to attend. The slides of my talk live 
> here: http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf
> 
> I flew back the next day, September 10, 2011, and it was a beautiful 
> clear night with a stunning view of the city. We sat in the last row of 
> the plane, and had an unobstructed view of the trade towers as we landed 
> near midnight. We went home, fell asleep, and were woken by a phone call 
> about 9am.
 
Cripes...  I remember it well.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Seth Morabito]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022, at 3:28 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> https://www.timeanddate.com/on-this-day/september/9
>
> ``Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system 
>   that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1, 1970, 
>   not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001, Unix time 
>   reached the billionth second timestamp.''

I remember this event vividly because at work we had an important system fail.

There was a database that was storing the time into a VARCHAR column. Unfortunately, we were sorting on that column and using the table as a queue so we could always be sure to pick up the most recent entries and act on them.

Well, you can imagine what happened when the leading digit changed from an ASCII "9" to an ASCII "1". Oops.

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

[TUHS] Re: Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

[Michael Kjörling]

On 8 Sep 2022 20:29 -0700, from web@loomcom.com (Seth Morabito):
> Well, you can imagine what happened when the leading digit changed
> from an ASCII "9" to an ASCII "1". Oops.

Let me guess. Something very similar to what happened to Microsoft
Exchange servers when the first two digits in a 32-bit signed integer
representation of the current date and time (formatted as YYMMDDHHMM)
changed from "21" to "22" as the date became January 1, 2022.

For those who don't immediately realize why that's a snafu: what is
the value of (2^31)-1 when interpreted as a string representation of a
timestamp according to that format, and how does that relate to Jan 1
2022?

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se
 “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”