{found in the margins}

The Problem with 2038

This is a members-only episode of Found in the Margins, short bonus stories released on Patreon between full episodes.

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{show notes}

There are clocks that cannot tell you what time it is. They only know how many seconds have passed since midnight on January 1, 1970.

In this episode:

  • How Unix time works
  • 2,147,483,647 seconds, or about 68 years, and what happens next
  • The move to 64-bit time, and why it isn’t the whole story
  • The long-lived machines that stop looking like computers

Episode Music:

Additional Reading:

Dinamani, D. (2019, January). Solving the Year 2038 problem in the Linux kernel. Opensource.com. https://opensource.com/article/19/1/year2038-problem-linux-kernel

National Weather Service. (n.d.). Radar. NOAA. https://www.weather.gov/about/radar

National Weather Service. (2024, August 19). Radar Operations Center completes NEXRAD Service Life Extension Program. NOAA. https://www.weather.gov/news/241908-weather-radars

Year 2038 problem. (2026, October 5). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Year_2038_problem&oldid=1375430674