UNIX and POSIX-compliant systems encode system time ("Unix time") as the number of seconds elapsed since the start of the Unix epoch at 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC, excepting leap seconds which are not counted. The limitation was inherited from UNIX. 32-bit values meant, to get a reasonable degree of precision, Day Zero had to be pretty close, so that precluded going back to 0 A.D., or, more reasonably, 5780 years and change, since the date of this answer is 10 Adar 5780 {g}.