5 ms·
Early versions of Unix moved the epoch quite frequently between various dates in the 1960s and 1970s. Version 6 finally "settled" it on 1970 and everyone has ju
by chungy 4y ago
Early versions of Unix moved the epoch quite frequently between various dates in the 1960s and 1970s. Version 6 finally "settled" it on 1970 and everyone has just gone with that ever since.
It's somewhat arbitrary, but by making it a signed integer, Dennis Ritchie figured it was good enough to represent dates spanning his entire life time. He probably thought Unix's life time would be significantly shorter rather than outliving him.
- marvy 4y agoI thought it was settled in Version 4. Compare: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man2/time.2 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man2/time.... vs https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man2/time.2 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man2/time.... EDIT: note that back then, it was a signed integer. Turns out that people wanted to be able to represent dates from before 1970 so we lost one bit.