GoKawiilExplainer: Why computers default to January 1, 1970 when time data fails
Unix time, the system underlying Linux, macOS, Android and many other operating systems, counts seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Early Unix developers chose this date as an arbitrary starting point after abandoning an earlier 60Hz clock scheme that would have overflowed its 32-bit storage within roughly two and a half years. When a Unix-based system fails to read the correct time or receives a zero value, it falls back to this epoch, which is why the 1970 date sometimes appears in spreadsheets, apps, error screens and file metadata.