In order to be able to reference times prior to the epoch. If you made the system clock unsigned, all that math would still break if you did calculations against it after the final bit flipped.
At the time all this was standardized, no one knew we’d ever have gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, etc. 32 bits for a clock was already expensive and they figured we wouldn’t be using any of this software by 2038.
In order to be able to reference times prior to the epoch. If you made the system clock unsigned, all that math would still break if you did calculations against it after the final bit flipped.
At the time all this was standardized, no one knew we’d ever have gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, etc. 32 bits for a clock was already expensive and they figured we wouldn’t be using any of this software by 2038.