Linux celebrates its 1234567890'th breath

By David M Williams
Friday, 13 February 2009 09:35

Opinion and Analysis

How do you measure time on a computer? If you're using a UNIX-like operating system, such as Linux, AIX, Solaris and others, time is counted as the number of seconds since an event known as "the epoch." It just so happens February 13th 2009, is the day that 1234567890 seconds tick over.

UNIX and its derivatives, including the wide range of Linux distributions, count time as the number of seconds since midnight of January 1st, 1970, in the Coordinated Universal Time – or UTC – time system.

On such systems that date and time is known reverently as “the epoch” – the beginning of all UNIX time.

Strictly speaking, this measure of counting time does not represent time linearly nor is it a true representation of UTC, because it does not have any provision to represent leap seconds. Not only this, UTC didn’t exist in its current form until 1972 – but nevertheless, the UNIX epoch is time 00:00:00 on January 1, 1970 and clocks within AIX, Ultrix, Fedora, Ubuntu, the lot have all been counting seconds since.

Cutting across the technical guff, numerologists, geeks and party animals around the world are rejoicing because the Linux clock is about to tick over to exactly 1234567890 seconds, and what a funky number that is!

This will happen on Friday, February 13th 2009 at exactly 11:31:30 PM UTC.

In the United States that works out to be 3:31:30 PM Pacific Standard Time and 6:31:30 PM Eastern Time.

In Sydney this event is doubly special, because it happens on Saturday the 14th – or Valentine’s Day – at 10:31:30 AM, proving undoubtedly how much your Linux-based computer loves you.

Check out the official 1234567890 day web site to find a party near you. Or, at the very least, an IRC channel where you can join in and say "Happy 1234567890, Linux !"