In Unix world, the calendar starts on Jan-1,1970 and Unix systems compute time since the epoch.[5]
The system call, 'gettimeofday()'- returns the number of seconds since the Epoch, which is defined as Jan-1,1970.
[http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/gettimeofday.html]
As was pointed out on Slashdot,([1][4]) if you want to be really precise about it, you would figure out that Unix time does not take into account leap seconds. Therefore Feb-13,2009 @23:31:30 UTC is not exactly 1,234,567,890 seconds from Jan-1, 1970.
To be precise, Feb-13,2009 @23:31:30 UT1 is 1,234,567,890 seconds from Jan-1, 1970 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time for an explanation of what UT1 is and how it differs from UTC.[2]
People across the globe celebrated this time by having party and such. See the coordination link below[3]
Possibly interesting further reading :
[1]http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/13/1534240
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time
[3]http://www.1234567890day.com/
[4]http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1127059&cid=26851049
[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
Anyway, Happy 1,234,567,890 seconds since the Epoch!!
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