Unix timestamps count seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970 — a date chosen with minimal ceremony when Bell Labs developers needed a fixed reference point and picked something conveniently recent. January 1, 1970 is not the birth of computing, nor Unix, nor anything in particular; it was simply a round number close enough to the present that the counters wouldn’t overflow too soon. Every Unix-derived system, every database that stores Unix timestamps, and a significant fraction of the internet’s infrastructure quietly agrees that history began on that Thursday morning. Events before 1970 are represented as negative numbers. The implications for historians, archivists, and anyone whose logs need to record something that happened in 1969 remain a source of minor but enduring irritation.
