In the Unix world, stability is measured in how many weeks or months you go in between reboots, not days or hours. While many Mac and Windows users can go days or weeks without rebooting their machines, most can not and do not. Enter Mac OS X. Mac OS X, being based on FreeBSD, a *nix kernel, not only has the stability to stay on all the time, it has the built-in tools to tell you just long it has been on. One Mac OS X user, your author in fact, has had his PowerBook on since it was updated to Mac OS X 10.0.3 some 36 days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes ago. Hereis a screen shot to prove it.

This screen shot shows you repeated requests for the "uptime" of this PowerBook, a 400 MHz Pismo unit. If you would like to see this info on your machine, itis very easy. Launch your Terminal, which is in your Application folder in Mac OS X, and when the terminal window opens, type "uptime" without the quotes. The data that displays includes:

The first line displays the current time of day, how long the system has been running, the number of users logged into the system, and the load averages. The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

For those who do NOT want to mess with the terminal, the Mac OS X developer community has of course released a GUI app that will get this data for you. Better yet, it works in Classic as well. Itis called Mac Uptime, and you can get it from VersionTracker. Mac Uptime is free.

Whatis your uptime? We have a thread on uptimes going on for this in our new forums, and we encourage you to post your uptimes there.