Sorry to resurrect this very dead thread but I would imagine we want to keep this discussion all in one place.
When I tried to assign a Date Taken (exif property DateTimeOriginal) date of "1980:01:01 00:00:00" to my photos, the date never showed in the Date Taken column of Windows Explorer. I have plenty of photos with a Date Taken in the 1970s. When I incremented the date by a single second "1980:01:01 00:00:01" the date began to appear in Windows Explorer.
As others have stated, this is 99% likely to be a problem with Windows Explorer but I wanted others experiencing this issue to know they're not going crazy and the fix is just to increment the date a second or so.
Split this off as the thread you posted in had to do with the file system time stamps and the associated Perl libraries, not embedded EXIF tags.
This appears to be a bug in Windows, as exiftool is correctly writing the tag. Add a second or subtract a second and it shows up correctly. There's really nothing that exiftool can do about this.