And unfortunately, I will not be retired at that time… I’m pretty sure that it will be like in the 80s with every developer thinking that his code will last only few months (years)… when it will actually last much longer.

Most of the liunuix (linux and unix) systems use timestamp stored as an unisgned integer 32 bit starting Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100.

The idea was to be able to measure time for a “long” period of time, from now (in the 70s) and in the past.
So they decided to use half of the 2^32 for the past (prior to 1/1/1970) and the other half for the future.

So be it…

Now we are about 40 years later, and we still use the same representation. We already had a party for the unix timestamp 1234567890 (which is quite stupid because it’s in base 10).

And now javascript, Java, PHP and C … use the unix timestamp… which means ajax, web 2.0, comet … which means: most of the online banking system, internet sites and all the smalls scripts that in few line check your credential and your billing to allow you to connect to the Internet… All the logging system, all the monitoring systems… well everything that you don’t see, just under the internet sea you surf on.

So what will be the next party thema?

• the end of the internet as we knew it
• the end of the unix system
• the 0×80000000 seconds since epoch?

Anyway, because of the ongoing ecological breakdown, the human kind will probably collapse before… so after the Y2K38 bug, the world will just be their kingdom. The kingdom of bugs.

Unless we spend time (which is running) in each of our application to think about that right now (and if we spend just about the same amount of time solving the earth ecology problem it will not be useless).