A good timestamp can be a very useful thing. Unfortunately, most current timestamps don't have enough information in them to be very useful, and they don't "age well"' and are too often not useful outside of the context of where they were taken. After decades of casual thought, Harlan started to document what information would be needed to have a useful timestamp, and what sort of underlying support would be necessary to produce and use them. This turned in to a GSoC project in 2013 where a proof-of-concept user-level library was produced, and some work was done to implement the new timestamp format as a core kernel timekeeping structure in a Linux kernel.