Follow-on to January 1, 1970 and your iPhone

In the annals of "why there?" starting dates for calendar systems, the iPhone is not alone.

Consider UNIAPI_TIME for Oracle Calendar System (a relic of when it was Steltor and prior to that CSandT).

So if you're using OCS and do a UNICPOUTU export (aka the OLD way of doing a full-state calendar migration with us) you'll see lines in the data files that look like:

K Events:

S 9699600

D 30

T J2J

G CR Mozart

I 0

R N2

M Hendrix Jimi

W Hendrix Jimi

A TRUE 0 10

C [ .+] Hendrix Jimi

C [ .-] Garcia Jerry

O 

That "S" entry is the start time measured as the number of seconds since January 1, 1991 at 00:01:00 AM.

And of course you need to be careful of this since the great North American DST redefinition.