The Epoch is January 1st, 1970, midnight, on UNIX systems. On other systems, look at the results of time.gmtime(0) to discover the date of the Epoch. Measuring time in seconds since the Epoch is convenient for storage and comparing dates, because you only have a single number to consider. The tuple contains several values, arranged the following way: year, month 1-12, day 1-31, hour 0-23, minutes