““Vernor Vinge's novel, A Deepness in the Sky, describes a spacefaring trading civilization tens of thousands of years (hundreds of gigaseconds) in the future that apparently still uses the Unix epoch. The "programmer-archaeologist" responsible for finding and maintaining usable code in mature computer systems first believes that the epoch refers to the time when man first walked on the Moon, but then realizes that it is "the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.””