this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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I thought truth mattered right?
...right?
I was intrigued by this article as 1865 isn't any epoch I've heard about and I didn't think COBOL really had a concept of an epoch (an epoch matters when you're counting milliseconds from zero, COBOL stores date/time info differently). I've been searching this morning and can only find the Wikipedia page mentioning that date - which is weird for an ISO standard that is 99% about date formatting.
Yeah I've only heard of the 1970 epoch too, I didn't realise different languages had different epochs honestly! Interesting stuff. I've never worked with COBOL but my old boss was learning it a few years ago, it's used a lot in banking right?
That epoch is a Unix thing. It may not apply to systems not related to Unix.
It's used in mainframes mostly. I don't know COBOL well but I've worked with COBOL systems in the past. I didn't think it even has a "date type" (at least in older systems? maybe it was added at some point?). They just store dates as 8 digits (6 back in the day which led to infamous "y2k" problems). That's why I didn't think they had an epoch. In more modern systems a date is typically "the number of milliseconds since the epoch". For Linux that's 01/01/1970. Either way this explanation for Musk's error is pretty sus. I'm sure he's misunderstanding something (he didn't think the US government used SQL ffs) though.
Edit: It's possible this particular team used that date as some sort of special value. That would be pretty common in older programming styles. But it doesn't seem like it's any sort of "standard."