Do you remember the 13th of February 2009? About 11:31 PM, GMT? Of course you do. That was when the Unix Timestamp hit 1,234,567,890,000. In case you don't remember, that's the number of milliseconds since the end of "the greatest decade in the history of mankind"¹, i.e. 00:00 on 1 January 1970.
So, 1,577,836,800,000. That happens to be (if you speak JavaScript)
Math.floor(50 * 365.25) * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000
or new Date(2020, 0, 1).valueOf()
, or the number of milliseconds in 50 years². 1 January 2020 is a big birthday for computer science.
We have a timestamp of 1666666666666 to look out for on 25 October 2022. Mark your diaries accordingly.
(¹) "The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black." — Danny, Withnail and I. Where this decade ranks in the history of mankind, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
(²) It matches up exactly, so I don't know where the leap seconds went.
Comments
February 26, 2020 13:07
Re footnote 2: the Unix timestamp, at least in JavaScript, specifically ignores leap seconds.