JAMES CLEWETT: The end is nigh, Brady.
Time is coming to an end, and I can tell you, actually,
precisely when time is going to end.
It's going to end at 3:00 AM, 3:14.07 on the 19th of
January, 2038.
What's going on is we're talking about
the end of Unix time.
Now--
BRADY HARAN: What's that?
JAMES CLEWETT: You're making a face at me like you don't know
what I'm talking about, Brady.
Most of us at home are using either Windows or Mac-based
operating systems for our computers.
And somewhere buried deep down inside that system is a little
counter that's been ticking away every second--
that's a fast second--
every second since January 1, 1970.
They began a counter in a 32-bit number, crucially, that
was just going to count seconds.
And obviously, because it's only a 32-bit number, it's
going to run out at some point.
That is the point.
This is the moment when that number runs out
of seconds to count.
This is how your computer is telling the time.
This is how your computer is keeping the date.
So you can take this number, the number of seconds, and you
can divide it and keep dividing it and keep dividing
it to get back to the number of minutes, hours, days, years
that have passed since January 1, 1970.
So, this is what's cool with the Unix Epoch.
Now the reason I keep talking about Unix is because way back
then, there was this operating system called Unix, which was
just beginning to really take a hold in corporations and
really mission critical systems.
The point is, in every single one of those mission critical
machines, there's a number ticking away, counting the
seconds, and it's ticking towards January the 19th,
2038, when it's going to run out.
And when it does, a very weird thing is going to happen.
It's going to roll back to--
I think it's December 1901.
So, in some ways, it's great, because it's an opportunity
for us to redo the 20th century and maybe get
it right this time.
But in other ways, it's going to be absolutely catastrophic,
cause it's a lot like the Millennium Bug--so some of
your viewers were too young to remember the Millennium Bug.
But those of us that were there, the Millennium bug was
a problem when we were storing the date as a two-digit number
in a lot of computers mostly back in the '80s.
And everybody thought, it's a long way away.
We're not going to have to worry about what happens when
we get to 2000.
But it just turns out that once you've got a computer
that works, say if you're in a bank or if you're running an
airline, you have a system that works.
It costs too much to bother changing that, so things get
left just working for years and years and years.
And it came up to 2000 and all of these computers were just
going to fail in some obscure way.
So a lot of the time the date started showing as 19,100, or
if it was a system which was dependent on the incremental
date, like it's adding interest to your bank account,
then suddenly it was going to go from being 99 to being 0.
And it was going to add a huge amount of negative interest to
your bank account, which is good if you've got a mortgage
and terrible if you've got savings.
I worked on this for a few years leading up to the
millennium, and we went around and we fixed all of the
machines that were too old to survive the millennium.
And of course, everybody knows it wasn't a
problem in the end.
OK, so there were a few cases, some sad cases and some quite
funny cases where it did go wrong, but for the most part,
it wasn't a problem.
So, we have to go back to the Pac-Man video that we did
where we were talking about binary numbers.
And in Pac-Man, we were storing that binary number as
an 8-bit binary value, and that meant that it could count
up to a maximum of 256.
Now, it's a choice.
It's either a maximum of 256 and a minimum of 0, or a
minimum of minus 128 and a maximum of 127.
So, this value has been running from a minimum of
minus 2 billion to a maximum of plus 2 billion, and this is
the moment when it reaches that
maximum value of 2 billion.
Well, it's not actually 2 billion.
It's about 2,150,000,000.
But it's a big number.
BRADY HARAN: When I turn my computer off at home and it
hasn't got electricity, obviously it's not counting
anymore, is it?
JAMES CLEWETT: It's not counting anymore, but there is
a battery inside, which is storing its current state.
So it depends on how your computer's set up.
Some computers are set up to connect immediately to the
server and get the current time just to make sure that
all of those computers are
synchronized across the network.
Other computers, like your home computer, are set up just
to read the date or the time from a memory chip, which has
been keeping its store with a CMOS battery.
What we're going to have to do, very simply-- same
solution as always with these things-- we've got to throw
away the machines which have got two small a number and
replace them with bigger version.
And that's already beginning to happen.
We're already moving from 32-bit computers, which count
in 32-bit numbers, to 64-bit computers, which count in
64-bit numbers.
And with a 64-bit counter, then this problem is pushed
out an awfully long way, and actually that number is
somewhere way beyond the end of the known universe.
Way beyond the heat death of the universe.
BRADY HARAN: Is it going to be a date when everyone's
worried, do you think?
Do you think this is going to be panic stations when this
time comes?
JAMES CLEWETT: Yes.
I think there will be a problem.
Because I remember being in a bank in 1999--
quite a long time ago now--
and looking at the oldest computer I had ever seen, and
somebody saying, oh, that's just our payment system.
And it just worked.
They used that word-- just--
and nobody had ever thought about it.
And I had to look at that machine and say, well, you
know what, your payment system's not going
to work next week.
We need to fix that.
And I don't doubt for a second that there will be 32-bit
computers sitting in the corner of some dusty bank
building, society, or airline or whatever in 2038, and
they're going to just go wrong.
And all of those bookings for your holiday in Malaga are all
going to be erased in some horrible way.
So I don't think it's going to go wrong in any
life-threatening manner, but, yeah, there will be some
comical errors.
And certainly for people like me who know how to fix this
problem, there's a great opportunity to--
well, this is my pension we're talking about here.
I'm going to go around upgrading 32-bit computers to
64-bit computers to pay for the last 30 years of my life.
I'm looking forward to it already.
You can go through and you can pick out key
dates in Unix numbers.
The 9th of September, 2001, was one billion, and quite a
few people celebrated that.
There was a small celebration in Norway for 1,111,111,111.
And so people are noticing Unix time ticking away.
But for most of us, it's happening behind our backs.
So, what we have here is the current Unix
time at 1.34 billion.
So if you're feeling really smart at home, apart from the
fact of the date's in the top corner of the screen, you
could work out when we're actually filming this.
Because this is the number that the computer uses to
calculate this date.
It's like watching your life just ticking away.