Tuesday January 23 2024 20:57:29 : 1706065049
Okey-dokey, what do I wanna talk about? It's 23 January 2024, or Tue 23 Jan 2024 12:41:18 PM CST : 1706035278 if I use my handy timestamp generator.
Maybe I should make it show the entire weekday and month, whaddyathink?
Tuesday 23 January 2024 13:12:35 1706037155
Like that better, think I'll start using it. That big number at the end is the number of seconds since Jan 01 1970. That would be 00:00:00 on Jan 1 1970
to be reasonably precise. That's 00:00:00 on Jan 1 1970 in
Greenwich. So it changes every time you check, like this:
Tuesday 23 January 2024 13:25:27 1706037927
In my military days we called it
Zulu time. My first duty station with the Air Force was in the UK,
and since that's where Greenwich is Zulu time was always the same as local time. Alright, the timestamp format is decided for now.
It's also called a Unix timestamp, or
Unix Epoch Timestamp, on account of it was invented by the Unix folks. They're
some guys - none of whom were named Algore - who created Unix. Sorry, that was the Internet he invented. [1] Hard to keep track. Anyhow Unix is pretty much what all computers
run these days, in a manner of speaking. The architecture is the basis for Android, IOS, and thousands of permutations that run on everything from supercomputers at NASA and DOD
installations to computers in cars and televisions. And watches of course.
Computers infected with Microsoft are the only exceptions, but Microsoft has cribbed so much stuff from it that the only difference in Windows is the bloat, crashes and security
holes. Of course some of the holes are intentional, but knowing which is which may be something even Microsoft doesn't know.
I was first exposed to Unix around 1980, when it was still mostly used internally at AT&T (the developers worked for AT&T so they owned it) and on some small minicomputer manufacturers
who found that paying AT&T 100K or so for a license was cheaper and faster and worked better than spending millions to build an operating system from scratch. The Internet is
about 90-something percent Unix-derived these days too. And I just remembered what it was that Algore had absolutely nothing to do with, inventing or otherwise.
Working for a small startup after my military service, they were selling half-million dollar minicomputers to small banks and were looking at the early Unix boxes. They found
a vendor to work with that had boxes they could sell for 100K and were about 10x the performance of the old IBM and NCR minis. We ported the code (COBOL) to the new boxes in
about a week and made some serious penetration in that market. It would be another five year or more before their competitors followed. Fun times. There was a window
there, late '80s to late '90s when you could make some serious money in that market.
I started using Linux somewhere around 1995, not long after it was released into the wild. Young college kid in Finland wrote basically a clone of Unix and thanks to the Internet
people all over the world got in and started building on it. Now what we call Linux is actually a massive collection of software that runs on Linux, mostly open-source, and the
Internet is mostly open-source software.
I use
Mint these days, it's based on Ubuntu which in turn is based on Debian which is a Linux distro. I use Ubuntu for my web
servers, but Mint is the desktop I've become most comfortable with. For writing I use Vim, which is a development of vi which I started using in 1982 or so. It's an editor from
the original Unix that some guys who weren't named
Steve Jobs or
Bill Gates wrote when they created the original Unix.
Looks like the weather is almost fit for beast (kitty cat went out a while ago), I'll go out and see if it's fit for man.
