In Literature
Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky describes a space-faring trading civilization tens of thousands of years (hundreds of gigaseconds) in the future that apparently still uses the Unix epoch, despite the apparent problems that would have arisen with older Unix systems following the Year 2038 problem. The 'programming archaeologist' responsible for maintenance of old computer systems first believes that the epoch refers to the time when man first walked on the moon, but then realises that it is "the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems."
Read more about this topic: Unix Time
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)