[Valery Romanchev]

тема много раз обсуждалась в девелоперском листе рассылки

I brought this up the last time (around November 2004) and sadly it's
true that there was never a real consensus on this topic. Back then, I
made a summary of the requirements and mailed them to Kasper, but that
was it. He did not feel that this was a priority topic and hoped that
somebody else might implement it. That has never happened.

You can find it the "historical" results here:

http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/User_talkbruehlmeier

It was my opinion back then that the dates should be stored in the
official ISO format, but I'm not sure anymore if this would be the best
solution. Probably, using adodb would be better. Negative timestamps are
definitely not the solution IMO.

However, I still feel strongly that this should be part of the TYPO3
core. I'm not a good enough programmer to create a coded proposal for
this, but I still hope that - maybe for TYPO3 5.0 - this problem might
be solved.