The best proof that time travel is impossible is that sixty thousand misconfigured time machines from all phases of future history didn't simultaneously explode into existence at midnight UTC on 1 January 1970
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Is the date a reference to something?
Almost all computer systems measure time internally as a number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on 1 January 1970. So if you're jumping through time but you forget to set a destination time, it will probably default to 0, and take you to the beginning of 1970 instead
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Occasionally you see bugs with real-world devices where almost this exact thing happens and the device starts thinking it's 1970. (Or, in western time zones like the US, late on 31 December 1969)
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Fun fact: in some implementations of JavaScript, midnight on 1 Jan 1970 was false, because it used the 0 numerical value and coerced it to boolean.
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I wouldn't say “almost all”, or even “most”. Unix and its descendants and derivatives (including Linux, but not MacOS) do. Windows uses 1601-01-01. Other popular choices are 1980-01-01 (PC BIOS, DOS, OS/2) and 2001-01-01 (MacOS, iOS).
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I suspect that many embedded devices (programmable thermostats or car infotainment systems, for instance) use 2001-01-01 as well, because they don't need to represent past dates and it makes weekday and leap year calculations easier.
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That sounds like the kind if thing you'd go back and clean up once you got the 2nd machine working
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Ahhhh! Thanks!
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I think my 3DS did something like that. It was weird.
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A Thursday – always a tricky day.
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