Elizabeth I dies and James VI of Scotland accedes to the English throne. Elizabeth I died childless so was succeeded by her cousin, James VI of Scotland, who henceforth assumed the title of James I of England as well.
T minus zero means out of time.. This comes from a countdown convention used in by both the American military and NASA. Generally, it is used when counting down to a major event that will happen at a specific time. Mathematically, T is time, minus whatever amount of time is left until the event happens.
You can pass in a pointer to a time_t object that time will fill up with the current time (and the return value is the same one that you pointed to). If you pass in NULL, it just ignores it and merely returns a new time_t object that represents the current time. Nb:time(&timer); is equivalent to timer = time(NULL);