What is the significance of January 1, 1970?
UNIX,
UTC etc. topic related. I also don't know the significance of UNIX. So
I'm basically asking what is the big deal (because I don't know).
Sign up for Quora
By continuing, I agree that I am at least 13 years old and have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
2 Answers
January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC is the Unix epoch. It’s just an arbitrary zero point from which all other dates and times are measured on Unix systems.
A more natural-sounding time like “the beginning of the first day of year zero” wasn’t used because of multiple problems:
A more natural-sounding time like “the beginning of the first day of year zero” wasn’t used because of multiple problems:
- there was no year zero (aaargh!);
- there have been drastic changes to our calendar system since then (different in different parts of the world) that would unnecessarily complicate present-day date computations; and
- representing offsets of about two millenia instead of a few decades would either cost several more bits or lose precision.
No comments:
Post a Comment