This fake manual page posted to the comp.humor
newsgroup jokes that
A.out accepts any option passed to it, stalls for a few seconds, and then prints a cryptic message chosen from the list below. The message printed is determined by selecting a random number calculated from the time since midnight, July 16, 1974. Each of the messages has a different probability of appearing.
It is not unusual to seed a random number generator with the current system time. However, even though the Unix epoch started at January 1, 1970, this man page uses a different date.
What is significant about July 16, 1974? Did something computer-related happen on that date?