In Unix, most system calls return an int that is either a useful value or -1 to indicate an error. E.g., read() returns number of bytes read, or -1. The time system call returns number of seconds since the start of 1970, or -1. This means it can't reliably return "one second before 1970 starts".

As a result, time travel to the late 1960s is unnecessarily risky and foolhardy. This is not good API design. I think ken and friends should have known better.

#unix #time