Y2K38 or The Demise of Your Friend Brian

Today is January 19, 2008 and just when you thought we were safe from Y2K and the horror was all behind us, another computer problem is starting to show itself.

You see Unix-based computers calculate time based on a thing we unix computer people call “the epoch”. The epoch started in January 1970 - just like me. Why they didn’t name it after me I’ll never know, but the way that our computers keep time is by knowing the number of seconds that have passed since January 1970. Its kind of cool to know your age in seconds by typing a command on a computer.

Every time calculation that the computer does relies ultimately on this foundation. So what’s the problem?

Well computers have a limited amount of memory for any one given piece of information. The current generation of computers can handle 32-bits of information. So the highest number that they can count to is 2147483647.

2,147,463,647 seconds from January 1970 is January 19, 2038. When that happens the computer will roll over like an odometer and will show a date of Friday December 13, 1901.

We have 30 years to fix it right? Turns out that we don’t. Computers that do calculations for future dates - such as calculating your 30 year mortgage - will start to have issues today.

There is a nice Wikipedia article that explains this here and even details a problem that cropped up due to this issue in 2006.

I used to think that it would be fitting if I died in January 2038 with the end of the unix epoch - but anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m an 8-bit guy at heart and I should be dead already. They will also tell you that we try get together and celebrate whenever Friday falls on the 13th because we are odd like that.

2038 Bug Web Site