So, was it a 30-bit problem?

It looks like maybe Apollo/Domain systems use an epoch of 1929-10-14 instead of 1970-01-01. Maybe that's the birthday of one of the early developers (or their spouse).

There's nothing particularly magical about the Unix epoch.

> There's nothing particularly magical about the Unix epoch.

When you have to debug the same event reported in five different timezones, and then see some ugly 13-digit numbers and immediately know that's milliseconds since a certain globally-coherent moment… That moment definitely starts to feel magic.

> There's nothing particularly magical about the Unix epoch.

It's the beginning of time, everything before is Omphalos; even the Omphalos conjecture itself; Unix is meta like that.

> 1929-10-14

Hmmm, about 2 weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, so I doubt it refers specifically to that.