Museum boffins find code that crashes in 2037

A stark warning about the upcoming Epochalypse, also known as the "Year 2038 problem," has come from the past, as National Museum Of Computing system restorers have discovered an unsetting issue while working on ancient systems.

Robin Downs, a volunteer who was recently involved in an exhibition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gear at the museum, was on hand to demonstrate the problem to The Register in the museum's Large Systems Gallery, which now houses a running PDP-11/73. //

"So we found bugs that exist, pre-2038, in writing this that we didn't know about."

The Year 2038 problem occurs in systems that store Unix time – the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970) in a signed 32-bit integer (64-bit is one modern approach, but legacy systems have a habit of lingering).

At 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the second counter will overflow. In theory, this will result in a time and date being returned before the epoch – 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901, but that didn't happen for Downs. //

zb42
As the article is specifically about date problems that occur before the 32bit unix time rollover, I think it should be mentioned that:

32bit NTP is going to roll over on the 7th of February 2036.