It's saddening to see the number of people who critique the idea of storing time as an unsigned integer by immediately responding that that means that times bef

It's saddening to see the number of people who critique the idea of storing time as an unsigned integer by immediately responding that that means that times before 1970 cannot exist. This bespeaks a continuing poor knowledge of the subject, despite all of the "falsehoods that programmers believe about" documentation that has grown up. * https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#dates-and-time https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#dates-and-tim... Microsoft, for one example, has been modelling times as a 64-bit unsigned 100-nanosecond count since 1601 (proleptic-Gregorian proleptic-UTC) for about 30 years, now. * https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/minwinbase/ns-minwinbase-filetime https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/minwinba... Daniel J. Bernstein in the late 1990s chose a 0 point for an unsigned count so far back that it pre-dates most estimates of the point of the Big Bang. * http://cr.yp.to/libtai/tai64.html http://cr.yp.to/libtai/tai64.html 1970 is not the mandatory origin for every timescale. (Indeed, in the early years of Unix itself there wasn't even a stable origin for time.) It is not a valid reason for dismissing the idea of storing time as an unsigned integer. It's also sad to note that the headlined page's first sentence has one of the very falsehoods that programmers believe about time in it.