GPFontaine wrote:

Syd Lexia wrote: When the most recent post in a thread has been deleted, it causes a glitch where the "Last Post" date gets displayed as Dec 31, 1969. The way the system is coded, it can't be allowed to display assign a null date without causing massive fuck-ups, so someone decided Dec 31, 1969 would be a good date to use. Why? I don't know. Since there is no longer a poster, the poster name is null and displayed as a blank space. When the most recent post in a thread is also the most recent post on a forum and it gets deleted, it fucks up the "Last Post" date for the forum as well. Syd, the null date is equated to a date of 0, that is why the Dec 31, 1969 is interpreted. Unix was released in 1970. On Unix based systems math for time functions is based around the idea that before 1970 time was negative. Therefore December 31, 1969 23:59:59 is recognized on Unix systems mathematically as 0. So what is up with the 6PM? Time is based on time zones. So whoever took the screenshot is at -6 from GMT. If you want more info, there is a good writeup here: http://www.lisaksimone.com/phoneonfire/2009/04/22/yo-today-is-december-31-1969/

Exactly.

"Day 1″ for UNIX was (is?) January 1, 1970, aka the begin­ning of the UNIX “epoch”. Consequently, if you enter “0” in the time stamp of a UNIX-processed file, you get December 31st, 1969 (More precisely, 1 millisecond before January 1st, 1970). Why 7:00pm? Is that midnight GMT? Why not 6:59 then? It also turns out that due to the limi­ta­tions of the way time is stored in UNIX — as a quan­tity of non-leap-year seconds contained in a finite (32 bit) integer, the end of the Epoch will come exactly on 03:14:07 Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Something to look forward to.