Friday is Unix Timestamp 1234567890 Day!
Would you like to impress a geek this week? This Friday, you can build some quick techie cred by wishing an IT worker a happy Unix Timestamp 1234567890 Day!
I know: “What?!” 
The Unix time stamp calculates the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970. Using this simple string helps programmers easily perform date and time computations in their code. This Friday the 13th (spooky!) will see a very special moment in arbitrary number history: about halfway through the minute at 3:31pm PST (6:31pm EST), exactly 1,234,567,890 seconds will have passed since the beginning of UTC. It’s a totally pointless but fun little reason to celebrate, like the calendar Year 2000 but on a much smaller scale.
It’s worth noting that a new sort of Year 2000 Problem will occur on January 19, 2038, when Unix time reaches 9999999999 and runs out of digits—also known as the Year 2038 Problem. As UnixTimeStamp.com explains (with an irresistible pun):
Before this moment millions of applications will need to either adopt a new convention for time stamps or be migrated to 64-bit systems which will buy the time stamp a “bit” more time.
As with the Y2K problem, my guess is that we’ll all be fine… but things could also go horribly wrong.
Welcome to 
February 11th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Um, a 32-bit signed integer overflows at 2147483648, not 9999999999.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
[...] per the site bits-bytes-2.com It’s worth noting that a new sort of Year 2000 Problem will occur on January 19, 2038, when Unix [...]
February 11th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
This might be the nerdiest correction ever, but I think it’s at 5:31p EST, not 6:31p EST. According to http://www.unixtimestamp.com/
February 11th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
@Geek — Having no idea myself, I defer…
@legind You might be right; http://timestamp1234567890.com differs, listing the time as 6:31p. Anybody else care to weigh in?
Maybe we can raise a toast at both times — like the millennium, when some people celebrated on 1/1/2000 and others celebrated the ‘real’ millennium on 1/1/2001.
February 12th, 2009 at 5:59 am
I think 6:31pm EST is correct. http://www.1234567890day.com/ also agrees. It looks like unixtimestamp.com thinks daylight saving time is in effect, which would cause it to list the time as one hour behind. Just as a final test, copying the timestamp from my local machine (in EST) and pasting into unixtimestamp.com gives the time one hour behind.
Also my point about the 32-bit integer was that the Year 2038 problem happens at 2147483647 (the highest possible value a signed 32-bit integer can store). 9999999999 requires a larger integer and would actually occur around the year 2287
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February 13th, 2009 at 12:46 am
[...] d’info: Bits & Bytes 2.0, Wikipedia, [...]
December 3rd, 2009 at 7:17 am
Next time include sources please =)
September 14th, 2010 at 7:27 am
[...] “bits and bytes” in its definition of hacking! [↩]Some of the articles remain strangely popular, traffic-wise, and I still use others as reference material. [↩] Comments [...]