[TUHS] Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

Michael Kjörling michael at kjorling.se
Fri Sep 9 17:03:10 AEST 2022


On 8 Sep 2022 20:29 -0700, from web at 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.semichael at kjorling.se
 “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”



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