If you own a Tesla, you know the joy that comes with sharing your experience with others. You want to talk about the latest update, the plaid refresh or pretty much anything that Tesla releases.
As an added benfit, those conversations can often lead to a referral where you get free driving Supercharger credits. Unfortunately not every referral turns out to be a delivered Tesla. You will sometimes notice that the canceled date displays 12/31/1969.
It’s easy to assume that the Meme Lord, Elon Musk is just back at it with another one of his famous easter eggs. However Elon is not trolling you with 12/31/1969.
The Unix operating system (which is the basis of Mac OS, servers and the Tesla referral system) tracks time by counting up in increments of one second, starting from zero. The starting point, zero is January 1, 1970, midnight Greenwich Mean Time. So for example, January 2, 1970, at midnight is 86,400 in Unix time, because there are 86,400 seconds in a day.
If you got a Tesla referral today, at the time of sharing this article, the unix time 1611792000 would be stored in a Tesla database for your referral time. When the user cancels, there is no value. It has been reset and the computer assumes it is 0, which is midnight 1/1/1970 GMT. Once you factor in time zone differences which is usually five to eight hours back for the USA servers, you end up with December 31, 1969.
Sometimes you will see the meme number and other times you won’t. This purely depends on if it resets back to 0 or not which seems more than likely a glitch.
So although it could be a meme, there is actually a method behind the madness…at least this time.
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