Suddenly It’s 1970!

Retro vibes or April Fool? This screencap from the Namib Desert Lodge’s refresh camera takes us back to a kinder, gentler, more innocent time when there was no Namib Desert Lodge, refresh cameras, or even a country called “Namibia”

Nope, it's not a postcard - never mind the seemingly faded colours and the nifty IBM Selectric style font - just a snapshot of a camera caught resetting after a very long outage caused by stormy weather

The posted date does take one back, though, to the very, very different world that was on the very first day of 1970.

We were poised on the threshold of a whole new decade filled with hope, promise and wonder... instead we got Disco Music, bloated land yachts with chromed logs bolted to each end, and household appliances painted Harvest Gold or Avocado Green.

We were also treated to an exciting new TV show called “Here Come the Seventies” that was shown on CTV stations from late 1970 through 1973… at which point it was canceled, possibly because the Seventies were here, and were not as exciting as they’d been hyped to be.

The show had a captivating theme song: “Tillicum”, by an electronic/progressive trio called Syrinx. The band broke up in 1972 after only 2 years, a lifespan shorter than the TV show.

The other noteworthy aspect of Here Come the Seventies was its bold intro that featured a nude blonde woman walking out into Lake Ontario… heady stuff for a 12-year-old lad!

Home video had not yet arrived, but the intro played unchanged through the show’s 26-episode run so we had that going for us, which was nice.

But I digress… the question remained, why did the frozen refresh cam display a date more than half a century out of whack?

The answer came from fellow mode Cape-Steve, who explained that “Jan 1, 1970 is the start of ‘Unix Time’. Computers track time as the number of seconds since midnight UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) on that date.”