I know the site has been full of hiccups lately, but while scrolling down the forum list today, I noticed that in the Business section, there was a post from 1969 showing.

Was Al Gore even contemplating "the Internet" in 1969??? He was just 21 years old...........
and I was just........gasp...............12 !



Rae

That's funny, and quite odd. What kind of glitch would change something like that?

That's funny, and quite odd. What kind of glitch would change something like that?

The UNIX operating system (which runs a lot of web servers and application servers) defaults to Jan 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT when there is a problem with a function that returns the current date. Adjusting for Eastern Daylight Time (which is 4 hours behind GMT) you get Dec 31, 1969 at 8pm.

Oh, poo. I was hoping that one of the Wilton brothers had come back to chime in......

Rae

It's kinda scary that you know that........

It's actually a relatively common problem when working with dates in programming languages (like PHP, which this site runs on) that interface with UNIX servers. Back in high school I used UNIX quite a bit, in fact I coded the first web site for my high school (around 1994) with the vi text editor on a UNIX system.

One way the UNIX date function works is by counting the number of seconds that have passed since Jan 1 1970 (the beginning of the "epoch"), so if it tries to use a value of zero (or a small number that rounds to zero) that's the date you'll end up with. I'm sure I ran into this issue at least once during my programming classes in college.

But I agree, it is a little scary that I remember that, especially since I haven't done any UNIX programming in at least 10 years.