{"id":641,"date":"2009-02-13T11:12:21","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T18:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/?p=641"},"modified":"2009-02-13T11:12:21","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T18:12:21","slug":"a-special-day-for-geeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/13\/a-special-day-for-geeks\/","title":{"rendered":"A Special Day for Geeks"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ll have to pardon my geekiness, but today is a very special day.\u00a0 Today, at 3:31:30 pm Pacific (11:31:30 pm UTC), Unix Epoch time will reach 1,234,567,890.\u00a0 It is kind of like celebrating January 1st in the year 1000, at the turn of the millennium.\u00a0 So that you can more fully appreciate this special moment, let me give a brief history lesson.<\/p>\n

You see, way back in the early days of computing (1969), some really smart guys at AT&T Bell Labs developed Unix.\u00a0 Unix is an operating system (like unto Windows) that runs programs except it didn’t have a graphical user interface (GUI with mouse pointers, icons, etc. — unlike unto Windows).\u00a0 A GUI was developed later, but at first it was all just command line stuff.\u00a0 For geeks, this is one of the things that makes Unix fun.\u00a0 Anyway, they needed a way to represent time, so they decided to use a standard integer value counting in seconds.\u00a0 Therefore, at 12:00:01 AM January 1st, 1970 Unix time started at 1 and they’ve been counting ever since.<\/p>\n

Back on Sept. 9, 2001, Unix time rolled around to the 1 billionth second since Unix Epoch (1 Jan, 1970).\u00a0 The geeks over in Denmark thought this was pretty cool, so they threw a big party.\u00a0 Those Europeans are really into the whole Unix\/Linux thing.\u00a0 Actually, I think it is more likely they are into the Anti-Microsoft thing.<\/p>\n

So, if you read this before the big event, set your alarms and have a moment of reflection for how Unix makes the world a better place.<\/p>\n

\"epoch_time\"<\/p>\n

(This image was modified for demonstrative purposes.)<\/em><\/p>\n

For those of you who want to witness this event, find your nearest Unix\/Linux machine and type:<\/p>\n

\n

date +%s<\/code><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you don’t think you’re fast enough to get it on just the right second, you can try:<\/p>\n

\n

watch -n 1 date +%s<\/code><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which will display once a second, so you’re sure to catch it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ll have to pardon my geekiness, but today is a very special day.\u00a0 Today, at 3:31:30 pm Pacific (11:31:30 pm UTC), Unix Epoch time will reach 1,234,567,890.\u00a0 It is kind of like celebrating January 1st in the year 1000, at the turn of the millennium.\u00a0 So that you can more fully appreciate this special moment, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13],"tags":[182,180],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8WrW-al","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":649,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions\/649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}