Survex and dates

[David Gibson]

In article "Survex and dates" in <!survex>, on Wed, 11 Aug 2010
Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote

>A 64-bit signed time_t allows you to go back to before 292 billion
>years BC.

Am I missing something here?  Surely the "date" is the date the data was
"processed". It seems a bit perverse to, for example, take some data
from a survey made in the 1950s, type it in, and then label it as
"1950". Isnt that a bit like digitising an old book and then hacking
into the file system to alter the time-stamp of the file youve just
created? 

-- 
David Gibson