Unix billennium
Encyclopedia
Unix time
Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time of Thursday, January 1, 1970 , not counting leap seconds, which are declared by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service...
value of 109: 01:46:40 UTC on September 9, 2001. Some programs which stored timestamps using a text representation encountered sorting errors, as in a text sort times after the turnover, starting with a "1" digit, erroneously sorted before earlier times starting with a "9" digit. Affected programs included the popular usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
reader KNode and e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
client KMail, part of the KDE
KDE
KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
desktop environment. Such bugs were generally cosmetic in nature and quickly fixed once problems became apparent.
The problem also affected many 'Filtrix' document-format filters provided with Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
versions of WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...
; a patch was created by the user community to solve this problem, since Corel
Corel
Corel Corporation from the abbreviation is a computer software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, that specializes in graphics processing, similar to Adobe Systems...
no longer sold or supported that version of the program.
The Unix Billennium is sometimes described as "109 seconds after the Unix epoch". This is not quite correct, because Unix time is not a purely linear count of seconds: "109 non-leap seconds after the Unix epoch" would be a more accurate description.
The name is a portmanteau of "billion" and "millennium
Millennium
A millennium is a period of time equal to one thousand years —from the Latin phrase , thousand, and , year—often but not necessarily related numerically to a particular dating system....
".