13 February 2009, 13:20

At the tone, the time is 1234567890

While it may be Friday the 13th in the UK today, it is also time for fans of Unix epoch time to celebrate 1234567890 day. At 11:31:30 pm GMT Unix computer clocks will reach the time of 1234567890. 1.2 billion seconds will have elapsed from January 1, 1970, the official beginning of the Unix epoch. Unix time simply counts the number of seconds since midnight GMT on that day, to tell the time.

Unix time will run out on the 19th of January, 2038 3:14:07 GMT, as at 3:14:08 GMT all computers that still use 32 bit Unix Time will overflow because the latest time that can be represented will have passed. It is also referred to as the "Year 2038 problem" or the "Unix Millennium bug."

A count up and count down clock can be found on the coolepochcountdown.com website. Celebrations are planned to take place around the world. The last time a similar event happened, Unix time was 1,000,000,000 on the 9th of September, 2001 at 1:46:40 GMT.

(crve)

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