Jump to content

Unix billennium

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by RaptorHunter (talk | contribs) at 01:24, 27 March 2011 (That's an unsourced opinion.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
1000000000 seconds parties were held around the world on the day in question.

The Unix billennium is the point in time represented by a Unix time 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 reader KNode and e-mail client KMail, part of the KDE 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 versions of WordPerfect; a patch was created by the user community to solve this problem, since Corel no longer sold or supported that version of the program.[1]

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", recalling the year 2000 bug.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unix_billennium&oldid=420906868"