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Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time
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 #France, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, whic...
 concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch
Swatch

File:Swatch Bijoux Jewelry.JPGSwatch 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
Time

Time is a component of the measurement used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects....
. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zone
Time zone

A time zone is a region of the earth that has uniform standard time, usually referred to as the local time. By convention, time zones compute their local time as an offset from Coordinated Universal Time ....
s communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.

ch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the attended by Nicolas G. Hayek
Nicolas Hayek

Nicolas George Hayek is the Entrepreneur and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group, with principal Headquarters in Biel/Bienne....
, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N.






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Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time
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 #France, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, whic...
 concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch
Swatch

File:Swatch Bijoux Jewelry.JPGSwatch 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
Time

Time is a component of the measurement used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects....
. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zone
Time zone

A time zone is a region of the earth that has uniform standard time, usually referred to as the local time. By convention, time zones compute their local time as an offset from Coordinated Universal Time ....
s communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.

History

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the attended by Nicolas G. Hayek
Nicolas Hayek

Nicolas George Hayek is the Entrepreneur and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group, with principal Headquarters in Biel/Bienne....
, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT 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 department within the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Devoted to research projects at the Technological convergence of multimedia and technology, the Media Lab was widely popularized in the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring...
. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.

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
Gnome

A gnome is a mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and wiktionary:subterranean lifestyle. The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus....
 desktop can be set to display time in this manner. PHP
PHP

PHP is a scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in Standalone software Graphical user interface....
'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 by the Israeli company Mirabilis , now owned by Time Warner's AOL subsidiary....
, and the online role-playing game
Role-playing game

A role-playing game is a game in which the participants assume the roles of fictional characters. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a role-playing game system of rules and guidelines....
 Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online

Phantasy Star Online is an online Role-playing game title, originally released for Dreamcast in 2000. A bugfix/upgrade edition, entitled Phantasy Star Online ver.2, was released for the Dreamcast the following year....
 has used it since its launch on the Sega Dreamcast
Sega Dreamcast

The is a video game console made by Sega, and is the successor to the Sega Saturn. An attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system, it was designed to supersede the PlayStation and Nintendo 64....
 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 the largest Sweden companies, is a leading 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 long-range, electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites....
 which gave the user the option of displaying Internet Time. Outside these areas, however, 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.

Description


Beats

Instead of hour
Hour

The hour is a unit of time. It is not an SI unit but is Non-SI units accepted for use with SI....
s and minute
Minute

A minute is a unit of measurement of time or of angle.The minute is a Unit of measurement of time equal to 1/60th of an hour or 60 seconds. In the Coordinated Universal Time time scale, a minute occasionally has 59 or 61 seconds; see leap second....
s, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called "beats". Each beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 second
Second

The second , sometimes abbreviated sec., is the name of a units of measurement of time, and is the International System of Units SI base unit of time....
s.

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
Decimal

The decimal numeral system has 10 as its Base . It is the most widely used numeral system....
 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, Switzerland
Biel/Bienne

Biel/Bienne is a city in the district of Biel , Cantons of Switzerland of Canton of Berne in Switzerland.It is located on the language boundary and is throughout bilingual....
. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time
Solar time

Solar times are measures of the apparent position of the Sun on the celestial sphere. They are not actually the physical time, but rather hour angles, that is, angles expressed in time units....
 at the Biel meridian
Meridian (geography)

A meridian is an imaginary arc on the Earth's surface from the North Pole to the South Pole that connects all locations running along it with a given longitude....
, but is equivalent to Central European Time
Central European Time

Central European Time is one of the names of the time zone that is 1 hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time. It is used in most European and some North African countries....
 and West Africa Time
West Africa Time

West Africa Time, or WAT, is a time zone used in western and 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 Time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 beats, or @875, in New York
New York

The State of New York is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States and is the nation's List of U.S....
, it is also @875 in Tokyo
Tokyo

, officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan of Japan and located on the eastern side of the main island Honshu. The twenty-three special wards of Tokyo, each governed as a city, cover the area that was once the Tokyo City in the eastern part of the prefecture, and total over 8 million people....
: 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 is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn....
 and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland
Ireland

Ireland is the List of islands by area in Europe, and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the north-west of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islet....
, Portugal
Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country on the Iberian Peninsula. Located in southwestern Europe, Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east....
 and the Canary Islands (Spain)
Canary Islands

The Canary Islands are a Spain archipelago which, in turn, forms one of the Spanish Autonomous Communities and an Outermost Region of the European Union....
, during summer.

Notation

The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation
Notation

The term notation can refer to:...
; 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 date
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....
s, although the Swatch website
Website

A Web site is a collection of related Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one Web server, usually accessible via the Internet....
 formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar
Gregorian calendar

The Gregorian calendar is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was first proposed by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, and decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom it was named, on 24 February 1582 by the papal bull Inter gravissimas....
 date in the order day
Day

A day is a units of measurement of time equivalent to approximately 24 hours. It is not an International System of Units unit but it is accepted for use with SI....
-month
Month

The month is a unit of time, used with calendars, which is approximately as long as some natural Orbital period related to the motion of the Moon; month and Moon are cognates....
-year
Year

A year is the time between two recurrences of an event related to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. By extension, this can be applied to any planet: for example, a "Martian year" is the time in which Mars completes its own orbit....
, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (d31.01.99).

Usage

Swatch released a range of digital watches, displaying both the standard 24-hour clock as well as Universal Internet Time. There also exist Internet Time converters for PCs, Macintosh, and PDAs. Mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson
Ericsson

Ericsson , one of the largest Sweden companies, is a leading provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks....
 also released a range of WAP capable mobile phones that also showed Universal Internet Time.

Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online

Phantasy Star Online is an online Role-playing game title, originally released for Dreamcast in 2000. A bugfix/upgrade edition, entitled Phantasy Star Online ver.2, was released for the Dreamcast the following year....
, a video game, uses beat time.

Swatch offers the concept on its website, but no longer markets 'beat' watches.

See also

  • Decimal time
    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 #France, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, whic...
  • Metric time
    Metric time

    Metric 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 SI prefix, such as kiloseconds and milliseconds....
  • ke
    Ke (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 ....
     = 10 'beats'
  • French Republican Calendar
    French Republican Calendar

    The French Republican Calendar or French Revolutionary Calendar was a calendar proposed during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days in 1871 in Paris....
  • UTC
  • New Earth Time
    New Earth Time

    New Earth Time is an alternative naming system for measuring the time of day. NET uses the angle past midnight in degrees, minutes, and seconds rather than 24 hours....


External links