Swatch Internet Time

   

Swatch Internet Time is a concept marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative measure of time. 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. There are no time zones; instead, the new scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) would be 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 rather equivalent to Central European Standard Time, or UTC + 1.

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 4:57:07.2 UTC. Sub-beats can be added at will for extended precision: @248.000. No notation was provided for dates, although the Swatch Web site uses a day-month-year format (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. 

0.875 × 24 = 21 hours after midnight BMT = 20:00 UTC

Its novelty and the usage of the metric time system makes it attractive for some people and simpler to use than the traditional Babylonian system of time reckoning (24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds). For example, knowing that there are 1000 .beats in a day, if one learned some event took 5500 .beats to complete, it would be immediately known that it happened over five and a half days. On the other hand, if one learned that some event took place over 5500 hours, it would result in no immediately clear idea of the duration covered without some form of calculation.

Although there are advantages to the system, it has some major drawbacks:

  • The use of the Biel Meridian (UTC + 1) to denote 0 .beats introduces an unwanted additional meridian; the Greenwich Meridian (UTC) is the standard international meridian.
  • The second, and not the .beat, is the basic SI unit of time measurement. The use of an additional time system adds unnecessary complexity.
  • Some criticize that the Internet time system is more of a commercial marketing attempt rather than a real system.
  • The noon is at different .beat on every time zone. For example in Helsinki it's noon at @417 but in New York City it's noon at @708. This is confusing and not very intuitive.

Most Internet standards actually use either local civil time with a time zone indicator, or the global UTC time standard.

The proposal timescale was announced October 23, 1998, in a ceremony marked by the presence of Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT Media Lab.

During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch that displayed Swatch Internet Time as well as conventional time, and convinced a few Web sites to use the new format. It is also widely used as a time reference on ICQ. Outside these areas, though, it appears to be infrequently used.

See also

  • Hex clock[1] (http://www.intuitor.com/hex/hexclock.html)

External links

de:Internetzeit


Retrieved from "http://www.centipedia.com/articles/Swatch_Internet_Time"

This page has been accessed 131 times. This page was last modified 23:16, 11 Nov 2004. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).