Happy Epoch Day!

Today is a special day in the I-don’t-have-a-life-and-can-prove-it-mathematically geek world…..for today, the epoch will be 1234567890 at precisely 6:31pm (and 30 seconds) Eastern time.

UNIX (including Mac OS X) and Linux systems use an internal time called the epoch - it is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 (the “birth” of UNIX). This is also why UNIX and Linux geeks weren’t too concerned that their OS was going to blow up at Y2K, since the time would simply be 946684800.

However, an epoch of 1234567890 tomorrow evening is a good reason to celebrate (what geek can argue mathematical truth?).

If you have a UNIX, Mac OS X, or Linux box, you can simply type date +%s at a command prompt to see the current epoch time. If you are limited to using Windows only, you can go to http://www.epochconverter.com to check the current epoch (but its not the same as doing it on a real Linux/UNIX box).

Here is a screenshot of the date +%s command output at precisely 6:31pm today.

Also, I noticed that Google was right on par with it too (see below) - this is expected considering that Google is run on Linux.