Today is January 19, 2006.
<p>Two years from today, somebody will enter a new 30-year mortgage into a system using a 32-bit time_t date variable and it will wrap around to January 1, 1970, the start of the UNIX epoch.</p>
<p>How curious - that’s also the date that people started entering 30 year mortgages into data processing systems and had them come out coming due January 1, 1900. And thus the Y2K problem was born.</p>
<p>The Y2038 problem has the advantage of the computing world moving to pervasive 64-bit systems, so time_t might just get extended despite everybody dragging their feet. But it sure would be nice if, say, Linux 3.0 defaulted to a 64-bit value.