Why is Tick() based on January 1st, 1970?

I’ve always wondered why they picked that data specifically. Lua wasn’t created till the 90s, and Roblox started way later. Does anyone know if there even a specific reason for tick() being this date?

This is not exclusive to Lua.
This is called the UNIX Time Epoch. The “current time” on UNIX and Linux systems is represented as the number of seconds past midnight on January 1, 1970. The year 1970 was chosen because UNIX was released around that time. Programming languages choose that because that is pretty much considered the first “second” on computers. Read more about it here.

Edit:
tick() is or is going to be deprecated, use os.time() instead

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