Timestamp Converter
Live Unix timestamp in seconds and milliseconds, ISO string, plus bidirectional conversion between timestamp and local/UTC date time.
Timestamp → Date
Date → Timestamp
Current time
What is it
A Unix timestamp counts seconds (or milliseconds) since 1 January 1970, 00:00 UTC — the moment systems treat as "time zero". Converting between that number and a readable calendar time is mostly math: seconds become a date, and a date becomes seconds. This tool shows both directions live and auto-detects whether your input is seconds or milliseconds.
Notes & fun facts
Why 1970? Because early Unix programmers picked a convenient recent date and never looked back. It caused the "Year 2038 problem" for systems storing timestamps as 32-bit signed seconds: on 19 January 2038 the number overflows — the Unix equivalent of Y2K, already being quietly fixed.
Origin & history
The Unix epoch was fixed at 1 January 1970 00:00 UTC when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were designing early Unix at Bell Labs around 1971–1972. The ISO 8601 date format (like 2026-10-14T12:00:00Z) was standardized by ISO in 1988 to make dates unambiguous across languages and systems.