An excerpt from my research of 1998:
Whomever originally designed this datetime() representation (Excel possibly?) wanted to make Day 1 = {^1900/1/1}. Thus, {^1899/12/31} should be Day 0. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize that 1900 was not a leap year. The whole scheme is off by a day, so Day 1 = {^1899/12/31} and Day 0 = {^1899/12/30}.
Here are the explanation:
Since being divisible by 4 was assumed as that being a leap year (incorrectly), a bug was introduced in a lot of software. In each leap year, February has 29 days instead of 28. Adding an extra day to the calendar every four years compensates for the fact that a period of 365 days is shorter than a solar year by almost 6 hours. Years are actually longer that 365 days. They are slightly less than 365.25 days long. That’s how we play ketchup (bonus points to those who get the joke and where it came from!).
The developer(s) forgot to consider the fact that years divisible by 4 is not the only rule. Years that are evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400.
Even based on this cheap trick, we will be almost a day behind in 8K years. But who gives a shit, people won’t even be here anyway. We’ll most likely have based time on something more accurate, or all traces of humans in this universe will be gone.
