> Allocate four digits for the year part of the date: a new millenium is coming -- David Martin, Norristown Pennsylvania
2038 is 15 years away right now; this article was published 15 years before 2000.
2038 is 15 years away right now; this article was published 15 years before 2000.
Harder to see reasons past 2038 back in 1970.
I still find myself confused at this one. Did people in 1970s not imagine that any particular program or database would "survive" for 30+ years? Was the expectation that programs written in the future could set the epoch to a later date?
Now that I think about it, I also find it interesting that the epoch date isn't configurable in any system that I'm aware of.
Dennis Ritchie has said that he picked signed 32-bit values with an epoch of 1/1/1970 because that would comfortably represent dates exceeding his life - before he was born until after his (expected) death.
I do recall from the time frame mid-eighthies to mid-nineties that three year old computers were obsolete. Ten year old stuff was ancient history. Never would I have imagined to be able to use Linux for 30 years.
Some time before then it was realized we had a "software crisis" as outsiders put it, and IBM realized they were spending too much money supporting many different designs, some evolutionary with minor changes?
Many ideas behind systems like Linux go back to the 1960s as well, see Multics, the primary inspiration for UNIX but ultimately a closed source dead end.
For the original question we have to realize how very small many old computers were. UNIX started on small DEC minicomputers, it would have made almost no sense at all back then to allocate more than 32 bits when your maximum data address space was 56KiB and your CPU was 16 bit (the PDP-11 family where UNIX became big following an incompatible DEC predecessor).