What is epoch time?
Also asked, what is the epoch time now?
The Unix epoch is the time 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. There is a problem with this definition, in that UTC did not exist in its current form until 1972; this issue is discussed below. For brevity, the remainder of this section uses ISO 8601 date and time format, in which the Unix epoch is 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z.
Thereof, why is epoch time used?
The timestamp itself is made up of a ten digit number which represents the number of seconds that have passed since midnight on the 1st January 1970, UTC time. The reason why UNIX timestamps are used by many webmasters is because they can represent all time zones at once.
why its always 1st jan 1970 , Because - '1st January 1970' usually called as "epoch date" is the date when the time started for Unix computers, and that timestamp is marked as '0'. Any time since that date is calculated based on the number of seconds elapsed.