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Toot

Written by joshua stein on 2024-10-02 at 18:06

I wonder how many things would have to be patched in System 6 to change its epoch to match Unix's, extending the system time and HFS dates another 64 years beyond 2040

I'm not sure why Apple decided to make a thing that came out in 1984 decide to start counting from 1900... I get the filesystem needing to be able to manage files that were theoretically created before it, but 84 years before it?

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Descendants

Written by Evan KC2IHX (he/him) on 2024-10-02 at 18:13

@jcs

Without knowing anything about system 6, could the code that uses that epoch get used outside of the filesystem? Sure not files, but calculations involving dates like birthdays?

Or could be a decision for backwards compatibility with something else?

As I recall, MS Excel on this era of Mac used a subtly different epoch, than the Windows version, and wasn't good about converting across platforms.

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Written by joshua stein on 2024-10-02 at 18:18

@kc2ihx Yeah, any old applications not expecting it would display dates 70 years in the past, but anything modern could check for a new system global that indicated the epoch was bumped up and factor that into its calculations

That way the new software could still run on unpatched systems until 2040 and show proper dates on both systems

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Written by Evan KC2IHX (he/him) on 2024-10-02 at 18:23

@jcs

Oh I get what you're going for... And maybe was answering the rhetorical question about why 1900.

I spent a lot of time dealing with a timeseries "database" format that uses 1900 as the epoch, and was invented far closer to that date than now. Under the hood it's got a similar concept of "extended dates" to help it deal with dates in what is now the "near future".

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Written by Tommy Thorn on 2024-10-02 at 19:45

@jcs You sent me down a rat-hole and then I lost my comment :)

TL;DR: 32-bits for time was always stupid. Here's the opposite extreme: https://cr.yp.to/libtai.html which is 192-bits for billion of years with attosec precision.

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