20 May
2009
20 May
'09
2:21 p.m.
On 20 May 2009, at 05:56, Derek Peschel wrote:
Interesting question! And related questions -- When
did the current
start of the epoch get chosen? Were there any false starts or early
changes? (I seem to recall reading about one change, moving forward
by a year.) And were there ever any dates in the system that couldn't
be correctly recorded, because the epoch started too late?
I'm not sure of the case in very early Unix, but I think in recent
(4BSD and later is all I know well) history, time has always been a
signed quantity, so you have as long before the epoch as you do
after. My wife has an amusing (in retrospect) story about someone who
decided it would be interesting to see what happened if you set the
clock on a system (these would have been Suns (definitely) running
SunOS 4.x (I think, might have been 3)) close to the end of time and
see what happens when it wraps: the result was a lot of files with
dates in the long distant past, and a lot of work to fix this (which
she forced the perpetrator to undertake I think).
However I have some memory that really early Unix (a) had a different
epoch and (b) counted in different units related to some clock
interrupt - 60ths of a second? - which gave a rather short wraparound.
--tim