What is the importance of 12/31/1969 to the IT world?

What is the importance of 12/31/1969 to the IT world?

• New Years Eve
• The first release of Windows 1.0 was shipped
• The Beginning of That 70s Show
• The beginning date of Unix and where it starts counting time from 

EXPLANATION

 Linux is following the tradition set by Unix of counting time in seconds since its official "birthday," -- called "epoch" in computing terms -- which is Jan. 1, 1970.

A more complete explanation can be found in this Wired News article. It explains that the early Unix engineers picked that date arbitrarily, because they needed to set a uniform date for the start of time, and New Year's Day, 1970, seemed most convenient.

 The Unix epoch is midnight on January 1, 1970. It's important to remember that this isn't Unix's "birthday" -- rough versions of the operating system were around in the 1960s. Instead, the date was programmed into the system sometime in the early '70s only because it was convenient to do so, according to Dennis Ritchie, one of the engineers who worked on Unix at Bell Labs at its inception.