IT'S ABOUT TIME

Herschel

Various events for the 9^th of September:

On the 9^th September 1839 John Herschel took the first glass plate photograph. The word "photograph" was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φῶς (phos), meaning "light", and γραφή (graphê), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light".

Confederate prisoners of war at a

railroad depot in Chattanooga, 1864.

During the American Civil War, Chattanooga, Tennessee was a centre of battle. During the Chickamauga Campaign, Union artillery bombarded Chattanooga as a diversion and occupied it on the 9^th September 1863. Herewith a photograph taken in 1864 in Chattanooga.

In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society (AMS)  conference at Dartmouth College on the 9^th September 1940, George Stibitz used a teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line.

On the 9^th September 1947 the first actual case of a computer bug being found: a moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University. From that time on, any problem was referred to as a bug.

At 01:46:40 UTC on 9^th September 2001, the Unix Billennium (Unix time number 1,000,000,000) was celebrated.

Unix time passed 1,000,000,000 seconds in 2001-09-09T01:46:40Z. It was celebrated in Copenhagen, Denmark at a party held by DKUUG (at 03:46:40 local time).

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is one of several closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). For most common purposes, UTC is synonymous with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community.

Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing instances in time, defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. It is used widely in Unix-like and many other operating systems and file formats. It is neither a linear representation of time nor a true representation of UTC. Unix time may be checked on some Unix systems by typing date +%s on the command line.