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Many computer systems measure time and date using Unix time, an international standard for digital timekeeping.Unix time is defined as the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (an arbitrarily chosen time based on the creation of the first Unix system), which has been dubbed the Unix epoch.
Software timekeeping systems vary widely in the resolution of time measurement; some systems may use time units as large as a day, while others may use nanoseconds.For example, for an epoch date of midnight UTC (00:00) on 1 January 1900, and a time unit of a second, the time of the midnight (24:00) between 1 January 1900 and 2 January 1900 is represented by the number 86400, the number of ...
System time is measured by a system clock, which is typically implemented as a simple count of the number of ticks that have transpired since some arbitrary starting date, called the epoch. For example, Unix and POSIX -compliant systems encode system time (" Unix time ") as the number of seconds elapsed since the start of the Unix epoch at 1 ...
The Unix epoch predating the start of this form of UTC does not affect its use in this era: the number of days from 1 January 1970 (the Unix epoch) to 1 January 1972 (the start of UTC) is not in question, and the number of days is all that is significant to Unix time.
The latest time that can be represented in this form is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 (corresponding to 2,147,483,647 seconds since the start of the epoch). This means that systems using a 32-bit time_t type are susceptible to the Year 2038 problem. [9]
MJD is the epoch of VAX/VMS and its successor OpenVMS, using 63-bit date/time, which allows times to be stored up to July 31, 31086, 02:48:05.47. [21] The MJD has a starting point of midnight on November 17, 1858, and is computed by MJD = JD − 2400000.5 [22]
An epoch in astronomy is a reference time used for consistency in calculation of positions and orbits. A common astronomical epoch is J2000, which is noon on January 1, 2000, Terrestrial Time. An epoch in Geochronology is a time period, typically in the order of tens of millions of years. The current epoch is the Holocene.
Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolute notion of time, however. They can have any epoch, can be relative to any arbitrary time, such as the power-on time of a system, or to some arbitrary time in the past. A distinction is sometimes made between the terms datestamp, timestamp and date-timestamp: