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Time

The Unix Epoch: Why time started in 1970

I was looking at a bug report the other day where a user's "Join Date" was listed as December 31, 1969.

I knew they hadn't joined the app before the internet existed, so I knew exactly what happened: somewhere in our database, their join date was set to 0.

In the world of computers, 0 isn't just a number—it's January 1, 1970.