I remember staying up late to see the tick to over from 999,999,999 to 1 billion, thinking "I'll remember this week my whole life". Little did I realise how 60 hours later the whole world would remember.
Timestamp 1000000000 (Sat 2001-09-08 18:46:40 PDT) triggered a bug in the bug reporting system (Remedy) we were using at the time.
The system stored timestamps as a string representing seconds since the epoch, but it assumed it would fit in 9 digits. At 1000000000, it started dropping the last digit, so it went back to Sat 1973-03-03 01:46:40 PST, advancing at 10% of real time. It was fixed fairly quickly.
Wow, that’s a really stupid bug, especially given the general level of awareness of the Y2K problem at the time the system probably was being built. Whoever the hell looked at a 9 digit timestamp that started with a 9 and said “nah, we’re never gonna need more than 9 digits to store that” should have their programming license revoked.
I didn't remember it was so close but those were the days I obsessively read Slashdot, which helped during 9/11, and which certainly covered the epoch event.
The system stored timestamps as a string representing seconds since the epoch, but it assumed it would fit in 9 digits. At 1000000000, it started dropping the last digit, so it went back to Sat 1973-03-03 01:46:40 PST, advancing at 10% of real time. It was fixed fairly quickly.