History Main / YearZero

* UsefulNotes/{{Unix}} time keeping uses seconds instead of years, with the 0 second set at midnight on January 1, 1970 GMT.

For obvious reasons, Year Zero is often invoked for authors who use [[ComicBookTime sliding timelines]]. For example, the formation of the Franchise/FantasticFour was occasionally used as the Year Zero of Creator/MarvelComics continuity, with 'present-day' stories occurring about 10 years after this. [[ContinuitySnarl This does not always work perfectly.]]

* Time in ''Franchise/StarWars'' is generally measured in relationship to ''Film/ANewHope''. This was eventually given a [[FandomNod nod]] with the introduction of an in-universe calendar established by the New Republic based on that same date, specifically, the [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yavin Battle of Yavin]]. The ''Star Wars'' BBY/ABY (Before/After Battle of Yavin) calendar differs from most real-life examples in that the zero year is expressed as both 0 BBY and 0 ABY. The transition between BBY and ABY happened at the exact moment that the Death Star was destroyed.

* Happens with particularly radical revolutionary governments, both on the right and left of the political spectrum, whereby a new calendar is instituted to replace the old - signifying a total break with the past and its irrelevance compared to the glory of the new revolutionary movement, often starting with a "Year Zero" or "Year One." The UrExample of this is from the French Revolution, when the Jacobins threw out the old Gregorian "religious" calendar and replaced it with a new "Revolutionary Calendar" starting from Year I. Other examples include Fascist Italy, Communist Cambodia, Communist North Korea, and the Republic of China.

* The Classic[[note]Pre-Mac OS X[[/note]] Mac OS used January 1904 as its zero point. This year was chosen instead of 1900 in order to simplify the logic of determining if a year is a leap year, since CPU cycles were precious on the early Macs.

* UsefulNots/{{Unix}} time keeping uses seconds instead of years, with the 0 second set at midnight on January 1, 1970 GMT.

* UsefulNots/{{Unix}} time keeping uses seconds instead of years, the 0 second set at midnight on January 1, 1970 GMT.

* In Frank Herbert's ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'', the imperial calendar starts at the creation of the Spacing Guild, which holds a monopoly over interstellar transportation. The coronation of the first Corrino Emperor and discovery of the spice happened around the same time: the end of the Butlerian Jihad, the Great Revolt in which humanity destroyed the "Thinking Machines" that had enslaved most of them. The year at the beginning of the first novel is "10,191 AG". ''However'', the Appendix also states that "one hundred and ten centuries" (11,000 years) passed between discovery of space travel (in the 20th century) and the Butlerian Jihad. Thus the ''actual'' setting of the first novel is roughly ''twenty'' thousand years in the future, double the ten thousand it appears at a casual glance.
** Among its many failures, the 1984 David Lynch movie adaptation just plain overlooked this, and started by stating that it is "the year 10,191 ''AD''". This is all the more annoying, because the core text of the novel ''never'' gives the date, the only section using dates at all is the Appendix - the same section that explains they don't use the AD dating system! It's one short Appendix section and they still managed to get it wrong.