What's the significance of Oct 12 1999? [closed]

Question

In the SignOut method of System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication, the ASP.NET team chose to expire the FormsAuth cookie by setting the expiration date to "Oct 12 1999".

HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie(FormsCookieName, str); cookie.HttpOnly = true; cookie.Path = _FormsCookiePath; cookie.Expires = new DateTime(0x7cf, 10, 12); 

What's the significance of October 12th, 1999? Is it an inside joke, or is there some valid reason to set your cookie expiration to that particular date?

Edit: The theories below are interesting, but they are just guesses. Since Phil, Scott, and other members of the ASP.NET team are on StackOverflow, I thought it would be fun to offer a bounty. Hopefully someone can track down the original developer and get an authoritative answer.

Awarded: To Scott Hanselman for escalating this one all the way to ScottGu. I was really hoping for some sort of super-secret, Illuminati-esque meaning, but looks like it was just the old "one year ago" trick.

Answer 1

Elementary my dear Watson:

• Oct 12 1999 is exactly 80 days before 1-1 2000.
• For some people the year 2000 was the end of the world
• As we know, it takes 80 days to go around the world.
• So oct 12 1999 was the last possible day to go around the world.
• As we know internet is wrapped around the world.
• So packets (and also cookies) travel around the world.
• The expiration date of Oct 12 1999 is the symbolic last day a packet could be send.
• There is no need to send it later than this date.
• So this is the symbolic date for do not expire.