Turning on the old IBM PC the first thing you get to see is a system message, asking for the current date – in this case in German:
Datum ist: Di, 1-01-1980
Neues Datum eingeben: _
So that would mean the current date is January 1st, 1980 – please enter a new date… Poor machine. Put in simple words: back in those days most computers could not guess the correct date, let alone remember anything from the past, simply because they didn’t have a memory that would remember.