[mark4o]

In Unix v1 (1971) it actually did not even track the year. The time system call was documented as "get time of year", and returned "the time since 00:00:00, Jan. 1, 1971, measured in sixtieths of a second" (https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/pdfs/man22.pdf). The operator had to set the time on each boot, and there was no option to set a year. The PDP-7 hardware could increment a counter every 1/60 second but only while it was powered on. Later the time was changed to whole seconds and redefined to be the time since January 1, 1970 00:00:00 GMT (now UTC), but was kept 32 bits.