[TUHS] Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

Seth Morabito web at loomcom.com
Fri Sep 9 13:29:36 AEST 2022


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 at loomcom.com


More information about the TUHS mailing list