From what I can tell, they were using the decimal digits of the 32-bit number as a sort of BCD, with the base10 digits representing portions of the date. The example used is "the new date value of 2,201,010,001 is over the max value of 'long' int32 being 2,147,483,647". So, YY MMDDHHMM ?

What an extraordinarily stupid way to represent a date.