How to Think About Time in Programming

> other epochs work too (e.g. Apollo_Time in Jai uses the Apollo 11 rocket landing at July 20, 1969 20:17:40 UTC).

I see someone else is a Vernor Vinge fan.

But it's kind of a wild choice for an epoch, when you're very likely to be interfacing with systems whose Epoch starts approximately five months later.

That's kind of the point of software archeology, isn't it? Sometimes something so evident to people within the first few hundred years becomes opaque in reasoning later on, and what's 5 months anyway? You'd need a Rosetta stone to be sure you were even off in time, otherwise you just might have a few missing months that historians couldn't account for.