Time

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, March 11, 2013
Dough Peterson asks, "Just how do computers store time anyway?  Does it think in days, hours, and minutes?" I actually have something like an answer to that question. Computers think in seconds (or, if they're stuffy, milliseconds). For a computer, any given time is a certain number of seconds after an arbitrary start date, known as the epoch. For unix computers (and therefore Linux and, these days, Apple) the epoch started at 12 a.m. January 1, 1970 (GMT). More...