And the Time Is

At exactly 23:31:30 On Friday, 13th February 2009 (UTC) the UNIX Epoch Time is 1234567890.

What this means is that under the POSIX time system (which is used by UNIX and many other operating systems), it will be exactly 1234567890 seconds since the moment time began which, in computer terms, was January 1st 1970 at midnight UTC.

January 1st 1970 is the year Bell Labs invented UNIX, which made that date as good as any for starting the clock. You can read more about UNIX time and POSIX on Wikipedia here.

For the geeks amongst you, the last time there was a significant date was back in 2005. March 17, 2005 marked the first time that time_t rolled over to the longest ever number of repeating clock digits: 1,111,111,111 seconds.

At the moment that this post is scheduled to be published there are parties going on all over the world to celebrate this moment in the UNIX Epoch. Why? Who cares! It's as good a reason as any for geeks to party!

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