Thirty-nine Steps » Millennium bug http://gordon.martensonline.be/blog My Personal Speaker's Corner. For Your Reading Pleasure. Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:39:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 End of the world as we know it (Y2K38) http://gordon.martensonline.be/blog/2008/01/19/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-y2k38/ http://gordon.martensonline.be/blog/2008/01/19/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-y2k38/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:56:14 +0000 Gordon http://gordon.martensonline.be/blog/2008/01/19/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-y2k38/ Time is NOT infinite, the end of time (and the world): January 19th, 2038 at exactly 03:14:07 (GMT). This is 30 years from now.

Every IT geek must have heard this at least once in his/her career. They started counting time on a UNIX machine on January 1st, 1970 (being time=0) and have been adding one to the number every second, while storing it in a 32bit data type (time_t). This means that exactly 30 years from now, the time_t data type will run out of binary digits. Overflow will occur (time will “wrap around”), setting itself back by about 136 years, back to 1901.

This is known in the IT-world as “The UNIX Millennium Bug” or Y2K38-problem. Hopefully this will not create such a hype as the previous Y2K (Millennium) bug, but nevertheless, we (all IT-ers) should start thinking about a solution to this problem.

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