9 min
A Brief History Of Time The History of Computing
-
- Technology
Welcome to the History of computing podcast. Today we’re going to review A Brief History of Time - no, not that brief history of time. But instead how time has evolved in computing.
We love old things still being used on this podcast. Time is important; so important that it’s epic! Or epoch more specifically. The epoch is a date and time from which a computer measures the time on the system. Most operating systems derive their time from the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970 when the clock struck midnight, when time began - likely the Catch-22 that the movie was made based on, later that year. This queue is taken from Unix Epoch time.
Different systems use different time as their epoch. MATLAB uses January 0, 1BC - which is all you need to know about Matlab developers, really. COBOL used January 1, 1601, likely indicating that was the year Cobol was written. OK so it isn’t - but I’m guessing it’s when many of the philosophies of the language were first conceived. Time must seem like it started on January first 2001 to Apple’s Cocoa framework, which began epoch then. My least favorite would be AmigaOS, which started Epoch time on January first 1978 - Nothing good happened in 1978. Jaws 2 and Halloween were released that year. Yuck. Well, Animal House was pretty good. But I could do without Boogie Oogie Oogie. And I could do without Andy Gib’s Shadow Dancing. Disco died the next year. As did the soul of anyone that had to use an Amiga.
Due to how many modern encryption protocols work, you want to keep time in sync between computers. A skew, or offset in that time, by even microseconds can impact the ability to decrypt data. This lead to the Network Time Protocol, or NTP for short. NTP NTP was designed by David L. Mills of the University of Delaware. It is a networking protocol that provides for clock synchronization between computer systems over standard data networks. NTP has been running since 1985, making it one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use today, with the most updated specs defined in RFC 958.
`date +%s`
NTP has had a number of updates over the years, although they have slowed as it became more popular. NTP 0 was released in 1985, the same year as the Goonies, Pale Rider, the Breakfast Club and ironically Back to the Future. Given that NTP was free, it’s also ironic that Dire Straits released Money for Nothing the same year it was released. Simple Minds, Aha, and Tears for Fears ruled the airwaves that year, with Tears for Fears proving that Everyone wants to rule the world, but despite being free, NTP is the one on all computers, thus outlasting the rest and being the one that ended up ruling the world.
Version 1 came in 1988, 2 in 1989, , 3 in 1992, and NTPv4 was drafted in 2010 but has not yet been published given how dependent we as an IT industry now is on NTP. To better understand how dependent we are, let’s look at the three main platforms:
In Windows, you can just “Double-click the system clock and then click on the Internet Time tab.” On Mac, open System Preferences > Date & Time which configures the /usr/libexec/timed launchdaemon And on Linux, open System > Admin >Time and Date. These screens allow you to enter an NTP Server. NTP is short for Network Time Protocol. NIST Internet Time Service (ITS) provides 24 names of Network Time Servers, and each vendor often operates their own, such as time.apple.com. Each machine then operates a time zone offset. You know Apple’s time servers because you can read them plain as day by default if you cat /private/etc/ntp.conf - it just outputs server time.apple.com. I’d tell you how to do it in Windows but it would blow your mind. OK, I’ll do it anyways: Just reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters and then read the value of the NtpServer field in the output. OK, not mind blowing. But what is mind blowing?
The Big Bang is mind blowing. Not the TV show; that
Welcome to the History of computing podcast. Today we’re going to review A Brief History of Time - no, not that brief history of time. But instead how time has evolved in computing.
We love old things still being used on this podcast. Time is important; so important that it’s epic! Or epoch more specifically. The epoch is a date and time from which a computer measures the time on the system. Most operating systems derive their time from the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970 when the clock struck midnight, when time began - likely the Catch-22 that the movie was made based on, later that year. This queue is taken from Unix Epoch time.
Different systems use different time as their epoch. MATLAB uses January 0, 1BC - which is all you need to know about Matlab developers, really. COBOL used January 1, 1601, likely indicating that was the year Cobol was written. OK so it isn’t - but I’m guessing it’s when many of the philosophies of the language were first conceived. Time must seem like it started on January first 2001 to Apple’s Cocoa framework, which began epoch then. My least favorite would be AmigaOS, which started Epoch time on January first 1978 - Nothing good happened in 1978. Jaws 2 and Halloween were released that year. Yuck. Well, Animal House was pretty good. But I could do without Boogie Oogie Oogie. And I could do without Andy Gib’s Shadow Dancing. Disco died the next year. As did the soul of anyone that had to use an Amiga.
Due to how many modern encryption protocols work, you want to keep time in sync between computers. A skew, or offset in that time, by even microseconds can impact the ability to decrypt data. This lead to the Network Time Protocol, or NTP for short. NTP NTP was designed by David L. Mills of the University of Delaware. It is a networking protocol that provides for clock synchronization between computer systems over standard data networks. NTP has been running since 1985, making it one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use today, with the most updated specs defined in RFC 958.
`date +%s`
NTP has had a number of updates over the years, although they have slowed as it became more popular. NTP 0 was released in 1985, the same year as the Goonies, Pale Rider, the Breakfast Club and ironically Back to the Future. Given that NTP was free, it’s also ironic that Dire Straits released Money for Nothing the same year it was released. Simple Minds, Aha, and Tears for Fears ruled the airwaves that year, with Tears for Fears proving that Everyone wants to rule the world, but despite being free, NTP is the one on all computers, thus outlasting the rest and being the one that ended up ruling the world.
Version 1 came in 1988, 2 in 1989, , 3 in 1992, and NTPv4 was drafted in 2010 but has not yet been published given how dependent we as an IT industry now is on NTP. To better understand how dependent we are, let’s look at the three main platforms:
In Windows, you can just “Double-click the system clock and then click on the Internet Time tab.” On Mac, open System Preferences > Date & Time which configures the /usr/libexec/timed launchdaemon And on Linux, open System > Admin >Time and Date. These screens allow you to enter an NTP Server. NTP is short for Network Time Protocol. NIST Internet Time Service (ITS) provides 24 names of Network Time Servers, and each vendor often operates their own, such as time.apple.com. Each machine then operates a time zone offset. You know Apple’s time servers because you can read them plain as day by default if you cat /private/etc/ntp.conf - it just outputs server time.apple.com. I’d tell you how to do it in Windows but it would blow your mind. OK, I’ll do it anyways: Just reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters and then read the value of the NtpServer field in the output. OK, not mind blowing. But what is mind blowing?
The Big Bang is mind blowing. Not the TV show; that
9 min