Swatch Internet Time
Encyclopedia
Swatch Internet Time is a decimal time
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 zone
s communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+1. And unlike Civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time
.
, 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 the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.
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 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. Outside these areas, however, it appears to be infrequently used. While Swatch still offers the concept on its website, it no longer markets beat watches.
frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties). Swatch reallocated the transmitter batteries to a different function on the MIR space station
, thus the satellite never broadcast.
fraction, for extended precision: @248.00.
. 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.
Like UTC, Swatch 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: 0.875 × 24 hours = 21:00 BMT = 20:00 UTC. Unlike Civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time
and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and the Canary Islands (Spain)
, during summer.
; 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. 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).
Decimal time
Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal...
concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch
Swatch
Swatch is a brand name for a line of wrist watches from the Swatch Group, a Swiss conglomerate with vertical control of the production of Swiss watches and related products...
corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zone
Time zone
A time zone is a region on Earth that has a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. In order for the same clock time to always correspond to the same portion of the day as the Earth rotates , different places on the Earth need to have different clock times...
s communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+1. And unlike Civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time
Daylight saving time
Daylight saving time —also summer time in several countries including in British English and European official terminology —is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less...
.
History
Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. HayekNicolas Hayek
Nicolas George Hayek , was a Swiss-Lebanese entrepreneur, co-founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of the Swatch Group, with principal headquarters in Biel/Bienne.-Life and background:...
, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association ....
, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...
. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.
Uses
During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch, branded "Swatch .beat", 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 GNOMEGNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
desktop can be set to display time in this manner. PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
'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
ICQ
ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, which was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis, then bought by America Online, and since April 2010 owned by Mail.ru Group. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase "I seek you"...
, and the online role-playing game
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online is an online multiplayer action RPG title, originally released for the Dreamcast in 2000, bundled with a demo of Sonic Adventure 2. Another edition, entitled Phantasy Star Online ver.2, was released for Dreamcast the following year...
has used it since its launch on the 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
Ericsson
Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...
released the T20e, a mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
which gave the user the option of displaying Internet Time. Outside these areas, however, it appears to be infrequently used. While Swatch still offers the concept on its website, it no longer markets beat watches.
Beatnik satellite controversy
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 radioAmateur radio
Amateur radio is the use of designated radio frequency spectrum for purposes of private recreation, non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, and emergency communication...
frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties). Swatch reallocated the transmitter batteries to a different function on the MIR space station
Mir
Mir was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, at first by the Soviet Union and then by Russia. Assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996, Mir was the first modular space station and had a greater mass than that of any previous spacecraft, holding the record for the...
, thus the satellite never broadcast.
Beats
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. 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 decimalDecimal
The decimal numeral system has ten as its base. It is the numerical base most widely used by modern civilizations....
fraction, for extended precision: @248.00.
Time zones
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, SwitzerlandBiel/Bienne
Biel/Bienne is a city in the district of the Biel/Bienne administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.It is located on the language boundary and is throughout bilingual. Biel is the German name for the town, Bienne its French counterpart. The town is often referred to in both...
. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time
Solar time
Solar time is a reckoning of the passage of time based on the Sun's position in the sky. The fundamental unit of solar time is the day. Two types of solar time are apparent solar time and mean solar time .-Introduction:...
at the Biel meridian
Meridian (geography)
A meridian is an imaginary line on the Earth's surface from the North Pole to the South Pole that connects all locations along it with a given longitude. The position of a point along the meridian is given by its latitude. Each meridian is perpendicular to all circles of latitude...
, but is equivalent to Central European Time
Central European Time
Central European Time , used in most parts of the European Union, is a standard time that is 1 hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time . The time offset from UTC can be written as +01:00...
and West Africa Time
West Africa Time
West Africa Time, or WAT, is a time zone used in west-central Africa . The zone is one hour ahead of UTC , which makes it the same as Central European Time...
or UTC+1.
Like UTC, Swatch 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: 0.875 × 24 hours = 21:00 BMT = 20:00 UTC. Unlike Civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time
Daylight saving time
Daylight saving time —also summer time in several countries including in British English and European official terminology —is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less...
and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and the Canary Islands (Spain)
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
, during summer.
Notation
The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notationNotation
-Written communication:* Phonographic writing systems, by definition, use symbols to represent components of auditory language, i.e. speech, which in turn refers to things or ideas. The two main kinds of phonographic notational system are the alphabet and syllabary...
; 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. No explicit format was provided for dates
Calendar date
A date in a calendar is a reference to a particular day represented within a calendar system. The calendar date allows the specific day to be identified. The number of days between two dates may be calculated. For example, "24 " is ten days after "14 " in the Gregorian calendar. The date of a...
, although the Swatch website formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar
Gregorian calendar
The Gregorian calendar, also known as the Western calendar, or Christian calendar, is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter...
date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (d31.01.99).
Time unit conversion
| Unit | Beat Conversion |
|---|---|
| 1 day | 1000 .beats |
| 1 hour | 41.666 .beats |
| 1 min | 0.6944 .beats |
| 1 s | 0.01157 .beats |
See also
- Decimal timeDecimal timeDecimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal...
- French Republican CalendarFrench Republican CalendarThe French Republican Calendar or French Revolutionary Calendar was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871...
- keKe (unit)The ke is a traditional Chinese unit of decimal time lasting approximately a quarter of a western hour. Traditionally the ke divides a day into 100 equal intervals of 14.4 minutes . The ke is equivalent to the centiday , a non-SI prefixed unit...
= 10 'beats' - Metric timeMetric timeMetric time is the measure of time interval using the metric system, which defines the second as the base unit of time, and multiple and submultiple units formed with metric prefixes, such as kiloseconds and milliseconds. It does not define the time of day, as this is defined by various time...
- New Earth TimeNew Earth TimeNew Earth Time is an alternative naming system for measuring the time of day. In NET the day is split into 360 NET degrees, each NET degree is split into 60 NET minutes and each NET minute is split into 60 NET seconds...
- Unix timeUnix timeUnix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time of Thursday, January 1, 1970 , not counting leap seconds, which are declared by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service...
- Coordinated Universal TimeCoordinated Universal TimeCoordinated Universal Time is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is one of several closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time. Computer servers, online services and other entities that rely on having a universally accepted time use UTC for that purpose...
(UTC)