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Why do you assume they didn’t consider it? Memory was too scarce and too expensive to do it. Unix time is 32 bits, so I guess Unix time was invented a bit late
by Someone 3y ago
Why do you assume they didn’t consider it? Memory was too scarce and too expensive to do it.
Unix time is 32 bits, so I guess Unix time was invented a bit later, but around 1970, when Unix was written, RAM cost around $700k/megabyte, or, ballpark, $1/byte (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm)
Even if you had infinite memory, you couldn’t use much of it in your computer. The PDP-7 that Unix started life on topped out at 144kB, the PDP-11 that it was soon ported to at 288kB (64k 36-bit words), and many installs wouldn’t have that.