1 JAN 1970 was a judicious choice for the UNIX epoch date; it allowed a 32-bit signed integer time_t type (counting seconds) to handle dates almost all the way

1 JAN 1970 was a judicious choice for the UNIX epoch date; it allowed a 32-bit signed integer time_t type (counting seconds) to handle dates almost all the way back to the year 1900 as well as 'way into the future.