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Happy 1.4 Billion Day!

As of 5/13/2014 12:53:20 PM, here in the Eastern timezone, we pass an interesting milestone: the UNIX timestamp passes the 1400000000 mark.

And what, you ask, is the UNIX timestamp? It is the count of every second between 01/01/1970 at midnight, UTC and this moment. Calculating time and date is kind of a challenge. You’ve got 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day.. how many days in a month? Well, that depends. How many days in a year? Again, that depends.

This presents a challenge for developers looking to calculate, say, how many users have logged on to a system in the past year. The solution is to rely on this Base-10 number, which was presented as a means to keep UNIX systems coordinated across timezones and locations. It’s a great way to calculate time, because it is  just like our normal counting system. What happened a year ago? Well, subtract 31,536,000 from the current timestamp and have a look.

This afternoon at 12:53:20, we will have passed the nice, neat number of 1.4 billion seconds since the very beginning of 1970. The next such milestone – 1.5 billion seconds – will happen 7/13/2017 10:40:00 PM. So, you know, set you clocks and get ready to party!