Whatever happened to internet time?
If all of this 12 hour versus 24 hour versus day light savings versus GMT versus Zulu versus UTC time information wasn’t confusing enough, we must not forget Swatch who kicked it up another notch by inventing Swatch Internet Time aka “the beat”.
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.
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.
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.
I really enjoyed the idea when it came out but couldn’t get my friends to switch. I remember trying to get them to go to the movies:
Wes: Hey guys, let’s see the @927 movie!
Them: blink blink
Wouldn’t just using UTC everywhere simplify it