What is epoch time?

Epoch time is a specific date used by operating systems such as Unix or Linux or some programming languages such as PHP, where seconds are counted and result in a new time measurement.

In these operating systems, time is measured in seconds at zero hour since January 1, 1970. This measurement or time value is also known as Linux timestamp. The Unix era (or Epoch time) is the period of time that started at the beginning of 1970 and continues until today.

Epoch time

Epoch time, also known as Unix time in computer science, is considered the number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970. In other words, it is the number of seconds counted since that day.

Epoch time, year, month, hour etc. It is used purely for efficiency reasons as it takes up less space to represent a single number in seconds rather than storing it in words.

The problem of the Year 2038

Era time is a huge number as many computers as of now run on 32 bit. Epoch time will almost exceed what 32-bit systems can understand. Around January 19, 2038, the era time is expected to exceed the maximum that a 32-bit system can understand.

To resolve this, any software that uses 32-bit timestamps will need to be updated to a new rule. One way to do this is to migrate a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. If the necessary update is not made before the time limit exceeds the limited number, the date will be interpreted as “December 13, 1901” and this problem is known as the Year 2038 problem in computer science.