Daniel Neuman wrote:
>
> Hello All,
> I happen toliek the year 1969 very much (it was the year I was born)
> but several people have emailed me and said that my letters to the list are
> date stamped 1969??? Don't know how this could be. These come from my
> university account which is running on a unix box. When I check the date
> from the command prompt I get the correct date. Does anybody have an idea
> what could be happening???
> thanks,
> Daniel
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 100 12:30:41 -0800 (PST)
If you look at the date line from the header of your message you'll see
the year is listed as 100. This came up recently on the IZCC list too.
Below is a good explanation from that thread, on how unix tracks time
and why the dates are weird on some machines. Seems the date
interpretation between various software and the OS can cause the sort of
problem you are experiencing. As to why you are showing up on the date
line in the header as 19100 and as 1969 in the date column of the
message list in Netscape (and perhaps other software) is beyond me, but
since the date is not 1969 in the date line, I would say the problem is
most likely with our email software trying to interpret the year 19100
from the date line when it makes the message list. If this is only
showing up for those using Netscape for their email, then I'll bet this
is a Y2K bug in Netscape.
> > > They're dated "19100" instead of "2000"
> > >
> > [snip]
> >
> >
> > This is because the Unix date is an offset from 1900. It is the
> > reason why Unix is 'Y2K Ready' not 'Y2K Compliant'.
>
> Actually, unix time is recorded as the elapsed time, in seconds, since
> some date in 1970. The number used to hold the string of digits
> representing the # of seconds since then fills up in 2038. Many
> propietary unixes come with an extra few bytes for the time string, making
> them hold the time up until some 5 digit year.
> The problem is probably the localtime function in perl, which returns the
> year as the number of years since 1900. Up until now, this was a two
> digit number and people simply assumed that it was the last two digits of
> the year, and used it as '19$variable' instead of adding 1900 to the
> value. The message board on z31.com suffered the same fate, but
> thankfully I didn't originally write and it wasn't me who did it:)
> Morgan
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