Unlike our customary clocks which repeat their numbers every 12 or 24 hours, the Epoch time counts up and up. I find this unceasing march of time a bit poetic.
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Many computers measure time by counting time from January 1st, 1970. This Epoch Time is typically not seen by us humans, except sometimes in error messages or some computer logs. This clock shows the count of seconds since Midnight, January 1st 1970 in 3 different formats. First is a 32 bit binary representation, where the most significant bits are in the top row, ordered left to right down to the least significant bit. You'll notice the least significant bit changing each second. The same number is written again in Hexadecimal form and then in Decimal form. The neat thing about the Hexadecimal form is that each digit corresponds to 4 bits in the binary above it.
Looking at the hex digits, the most significant digit changes every 8.5 years, the second digit changes a little over 6 months. The 3rd digit changes a little over 12 days, while the 4th digit changes every 18 hours or so. 5th changes in a little over an hour, 6th about 4 minutes, and it's easy to see the 7th at 16 seconds and the last digit changes every second.When do the higher numbers change?