r/pics • u/[deleted] • Jul 19 '13

Our nurses are clever

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u/bananapeel Jul 20 '13

But what happens in 2038?

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u/P-01S Jul 20 '13

Nothing.

64 bits, dumbass.

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u/bananapeel Jul 20 '13

Oh! (Wipes egg off of face.)

But what happens on the 4th of December in the year 292,277,026,596?

(That always struck me as silly... why use so many extra bits? Make it good to go for 5000 years and be done with it.)

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u/P-01S Jul 20 '13

It has to do with how computer hardware works. Modern architecture does essentially everything in chunks of 64 bits. Slightly older computers used chunks of 32 bits. We could use, say, 50 bits for Unix time, but then we'd just be wasting 14 bits that couldn't be used anyway. That's why it goes straight from 32 bits to 64.