[zliplus]

From a programming perspective, 1970 is the 'epoch', or the start of time for some date/time structures.

More specifically, the epoch or midnight proleptic Coordinated Universal Time is Jan 1, 1970 UTC, which is 6 PM Dec 31 1969 in Normal (non-DST) Central Time. Simpler data structures represent date/time as the number of milliseconds passed since the epoch, so zen's creation date/time is 0 on the server (which like many servers, doesn't run DST).