Swatch Internet Time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Swatch Internet Time is a concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.
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[edit] Description
Instead of hours and minutes, the 24 hour day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats", each .beat being 1 minute and 26.4 seconds, and equal to the decimal minute introduced during the French Revolution. There are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time at the Biel meridian, but is equivalent to Central European Time and West Africa Time or UTC+1. However, unlike civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time and thus it matches Central European Time during winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the UK, Ireland and Portugal, during summer.
The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation; as an example, "@248" would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 4:57:07.2 UTC. Although Swatch does not specify units smaller than one .beat, third party implementations have extended the standard by adding "centibeats" or "sub-beats" as a decimal fraction, for extended precision: @248.00. No explicit format was provided for dates, although the Swatch website formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (d31.01.99).
Like UTC, Internet time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo.
With its decimal character the time system is supposed to be more attractive for some people than the traditional Babylonian system of time units (24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds). For example, if one learned some event took 5500 .beats to complete, it would be easy to see that it happened over five and a half days. But if one learned that an event took place over 132 hours, its duration in days would be less obvious. On the other hand, converting Internet Time to and from local standard times is more complicated than it is for UTC, which usually requires only the addition or subtraction of whole hours, or sometimes half-hours, and a beat is not divisible by a whole number of seconds.
[edit] History
The timescale was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab.
During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch that displayed Swatch Internet Time as well as standard time, and even convinced a few websites (such as CNN.com) to use the new format. The clock applet in the GNOME desktop can be set to display time in this manner. PHP's date() function has a format specifier 'B' which returns the Swatch Internet Time notation for a given time stamp. It is also used as a time reference on ICQ, and the online role-playing game Phantasy Star Online has used it since its launch on the Sega Dreamcast in 2000 to try to facilitate cross-continent gaming (as the game allowed Japanese, American and European players to mingle on the same servers). In March, 2001, Ericsson released the T20e, a mobile phone which gave the user the option of displaying Internet Time. No further Ericsson phones had this feature. Outside these areas, though, it appears to be infrequently used.
In early 1999, Swatch began a marketing campaign based around the launch of their Beatnik satellite for a set of Internet Time watches. However, they were criticized for planning to use an amateur radio frequency for promotional purposes, and the satellite never made any broadcasts.[1]
