It started one second after midnight, UTC, on January 1st, 1970. It has not stopped since. Everyone reading this page is looking at the same number, right now.
Reading the universal clock. Not ours. Yours, mine, and every machine on Earth's.
For all of human history, time had no shared zero. It existed — sunrises, heartbeats, empires — but nothing was numbered against one agreed origin. Time without a ruler.
On the edge of 1970, a handful of engineers at Bell Labs needed a place to start counting. They picked the nearest clean midnight and called it zero. Not because it was sacred — because it made the math simple.
That arbitrary second became invisible bedrock. Every file timestamp, every login, every message you've ever sent hangs off that one decision.
From that instant, the count only goes one direction: up. Plus one, plus one, plus one — a second at a time, with no pause button and no finish line.
You're not watching a clock we started. You're standing on a number the whole world is standing on, at the same time, together.
This page stays accurate because it isn't running its own clock — it reads the one already inside your device, the same one inside every computer on the planet. They all count from the same second. One footnote: on Jan 19, 2038, old 32-bit machines run out of room to count higher — the famous Year 2038 problem. Newer systems count on.