The Time That Unix Forgot
posted by DL Byron on February 12, 2009
On this day in 1969, the Mobile News Network app published these headlines.
Technically, the reason a Mac defaults to that date is because the actual Unix epoch is in GMT. Here in the US, it was a few hours before midnight 12/31/69 at the moment of the epoch (Unix counts the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 to establish dates). If a programmer hands back a zero, or a negative number like for an error, instead of the Unix date, then boom: it’s back to the future 1969.
Much happens on 12/31/69, including daily news, blog posts, and even podcasts.
For the record, in 1969. I was nearly 2 years old, Led Zepplin released an album, and it was considering the year that everything changed.
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