[TUHS] Happy birthday, Unix timestamp!

Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
Fri Sep 9 22:06:33 AEST 2022


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

I first saw a time-overflow bug more than 60 years ago. Accounting
went haywire in the Bell Labs' comp center on day 256 of the year,
when the encoded output of a new time clock reached the sign bit.

Doug


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