.Beat Swatch Internet Time
beats.wikiI don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places.
Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons.
Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".)
Finally, we don't have per-latitude calendar and things are working fine for us. It's February here and February in Argentina, and yet life doesn't stop even though it corresponds to winter here but to summer there.
It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months.
The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March.
There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
I think you mean complaining about metrication 50 years later :-)
The counterpoint is that without the metric system how could we make snarky comments on US-based woodworking videos?
I was specifically thinking of the "Metric Martyrs" who were jailed over refusing to display weights and measures in metric.
The law requiring metric didn't actually come into force until 2000, these cases were early 2000s. Note that the law to this day still allows for imperial measurements to also be displayed, but they wanted to display in solely imperial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs
The situation another 20 years later is rosier, even the boomers have spent most their adulthood with metric, and they're dying off now.
> There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning
Why not just offset the office and opening etc hours by +1?
Because society and culture doesn't work like that.
You can't will a culture of closing up at 4pm during GMT and 5pm during BST. That's just even more confusing.
The talk was +1 offset in clocks all year around, in effect dropping DST and changing the timezone.
Also a lot of places and services have different hours during different seasons.
If you're going through the hassle of dropping DST, why not settle on BST as the permanent timezone if that's what the preference is for hours of daylight?
Asking an entire culture to change from 09:00-17:30 to 08:00-16:30 seems awkward and doomed to failure in comparison to simply landing on BST instead.
the obvious solution is to move it by .5 the whole year round.
Australian here!
I constantly forget which way the half hour difference is between Adelaide and Melbourne / Sydney!
Then I have regular contact with offices in London and LA. For some of the year it’s not too bad, and then our clocks switch the opposite way and it gets less convenient! Which way is which I can never remember.
Queensland doesn’t bother changing their clocks at all.
Writing software that deals with Timezones isn’t too bad these days, but supporting it is as it constantly confuses users I find!
You have some fun ones. On the other side of the spectrum is PRC, where at the same hour of day it can be complete darkness on one side and almost technically noon on the other. It's super arbitrary with little rhyme or reason.
I used to think this, but mirroring the sun position makes a lot of sense. If I wanted to meet w/ someone in Australia, I would still need to know extra information (what their equivalent 9-5 working hours are).
You would need to know that person's working hours, so I don't see how you are avoiding something.
Sure, if you talk to someone there for the first time, you would need to learn what time is generally day/night. However, you will know that 2-3 times in. Just like you would automatically know that now it's summer in Oz, or 3 hour short days near Arctic circle, if you talk to anyone from there even very occasionally.
Case in point, we have global calendar with no problems.
My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing.
If you really need to coordinate something across many timezones, you currently have the option to use UTC to specify the time.
Following the sun also gives a lot of context. (i.e. if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night, but if my flight lands at 1PM UTC, I really have no context as to what time of day I'll be landing)
> My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing.
It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.
> if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night
What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean something like "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).
> It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.
I'm sure people deal w/ more complex issues, but 90% of it is covered by storing everything as UTC and doing the conversion on the frontend.
> What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).
It implies a lot, including that less things are likely to be open, it's likely to be dark, and that I'll probably want to get to bed within a couple of hours to wake up for whatever I'm doing the next day at a reasonable time in the morning (i.e. how to adjust to the daylight cycle there).
Things you will have in context when traveling: "it's going to be cold", "it's likely to rain", "it's going to be government conference so there will be extra delays with transport", "it's going to be %holiday% so everything's going to be closed all week", etc.
You're so used to it you don't even question that, and if you add to that "@x is when sunset usually happens"... somehow I think the world will not come crashing down.
I don't think the world would come crashing down, but what's the point if it's just another thing to memorize?
The total cost/effort of timestamp translation in systems is not as high as people make it out to be.
> just another thing to memorize
Not knowing what time it is for my Australian colleagues at all without checking my phone every single time is worse. Remembering N timezone offsets (remember DST and half-hour offsets, too) is worse. Doing UTC translation or adding "my time/your time" every time is worse.
If you talk mental overhead, current system is like 10x of that than global time.
We agreed to meet at "8pm their time" but unless I literally put it into my TZ-enabled calendar app every time the chance I mentally translate it to my TZ wrong is unacceptably high. With global time, meeting would be @123 and that's it. I can keep it in my head or write it down on paper, no confusion and full precision every time. I don't even need to know if it's day or night if it's a remote call with the other side of the Earth, maybe me or my colleague works late, who cares, but I know what time it is there at any moment.
> is not as high as people make it out to be.
It's not just timestamp translation and all the errors that come from that, it's all the rest of it, waste standardizing timezones and moving them around, having to convert time all the time, missed meetings, etc.
Fun fact, PHP has built in support for Swatch Internet Time with it's "B" format token.
What a blast from the past. I added that!
Oh really? Hah, you are the reason I've known about Swatch Internet Time for the last 20+ years.
I read the PHP docs and wondered "What in the heck is that?" before Googling it.
I love seeing stuff like this on HN, that's really cool.
Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep...
Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
related
To be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.
Aren't we saying the same thing?
On second thoughts, the extra information is probably less complicated, Steve can say "I'm available between @300 and @1000" (maybe he keeps odd hours), and this knowledge plus a glance at the current time can tell me whether I can call Steve.
Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC, and the same lack of maths is needed. Although, we still need maths because most of us don't use UTC time, in the UK only half a year as well. Except Icelanders...
> Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC
Good luck convincing Aussies, Kiwis and Americans to share their times in UTC without having to ask or doing the conversion yourself.
This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
This comes from that short period where the Internet was meant to be the bonding agent for our global village bright happy future.
And it was always portrayed as a solution for arranging meetings for you and your friends or business people on the other side of planet.
I think the other idea from these times was abolishing phone numbers and using unified global email-like identifiers. And in a way we got this on social media - some people use same account names everywhere - not mention keybase, and we also have instant messengers on smartphones in our pockets.
it was an frutiger Aero thing also drum and bass
The Sega Dreamcast online RPG "Phantasy Star Online" displayed the current time in beats.
"And because Sega is working with Swatch, we wanted to encourage the use of the BEAT system."
This was also marketing driven, it seems.
Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)
"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."
https://web.archive.org/web/20021208112249/http://www.sega.c...
I _just_ got my dreamcast with PSO back online and was wondering what time it was displaying!
Thank you for helping me discover the source of this little brainwurm.
Most definitely marketing. It’s got the company name in it. I’m surprised other watch makers didn’t come up with their own time standards as gimmicks.
Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
> Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
I was about to comment that it's not UTC, it's in my local time. Then I remembered my local time (Europe/London) is currently equivalent to UTC, so I have no idea what it's actually displaying (it's not indicated in any way).
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
Yeah, the UI is slightly ambiguous about it, but FWIW I see the time as one hour off, which makes sense since I'm in +1 :)
The API shows a unambiguous timestamp, which is the exact same value I see for your comment: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46958592
> created_at: "2026-02-10T12:03:56.000Z"
Your comment currently says "7 minutes ago" and 12:03:56, yet here it is 13:11.
Having worked at firms based in New York, Chicago and London, every time there has been a debate about "Should we use local or UTC time?", I ALWAYS mention Swatch Internet Time.
The fact that it's now on the front page of Hacker News makes me so happy.
When I worked for a nationwide company, that was chiefly WFH with several small satellite offices, and a few abroad as well, we had some timezone issues.
The main one, which became my pet peeve about event and meeting announcements, was that they always, always used Standard Time abbreviations, whether it was DST or not DST, they always specified standard time.
So if a meeting was at 3pm on June 13 in Delaware, it was announced as "3pm EST". If the meeting was at 9am on August 8 in California, it was announced "9am PST".
This drove me up the wall because, living in Arizona, there is a legitimate difference for us between "MDT" and "MST". Now if we anticipate this quirk, it is really not a problem, except for edge-cases.
But I complained and asked why they were doing it, and they said they'd always done it that way, and even implied that it was written into policy somehow, and I came to discover it was far more widespread than just our one company's internal comms, and my brain exploded with ASD dissonance.
I couldnt quite get the benefit of this. It's similar to UTC, but then in a format that doesn't make sense unless you convert it back to minutes? Why not use UTC, it is already in human understand format.
same here, this is just moving to switzerland as the base time.
https://www.swatch.com/en-ch/internet-time.html https://beats.wiki/0
Fun!
Not sure if it's a bug, but for the date+time permalink at the bottom, the displayed link changes but the underlying href is locked to 7 months ago
I’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere.
From the official Swatch page:
> The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
It means it was at a Swatch marketing event that featured Negroponte in person, in the room as they started the system.
It's like saying the Amiga 1000 was launched in the presence of Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol.
Maybe because I'm European and there are direct translations in my native tongue, "in the presence of" sounds just fine if a bit official.
Makes sense. Probably a literal translation, then.
Thanks!
> I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
That is what an artificial intelligence would say, unable to comprehend the existence of the physical world :-)
(I've also just finished reading the novel Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around a similar plot point, but it's aliens)
The swatch.com website still shows @beats in the upper left corner.
I am unsure whether Swatch still markets watches with digital displays.
Swatch® Internet Time, or .beat time, is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998, dividing the day into 1,000 ".beats" rather than hours and minutes. It eliminates time zones by anchoring to "Biel Mean Time" (UTC+1). One beat equals 86.4 seconds, with the time written as @000 to @999
I never understand why smart people promote metric measurements. If you are smart, wouldn’t want to use the most complex and arcane version of everything?
Let’s play Fizzbin, everyone!
This was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that.
Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on.
Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
While deciday is workable hour replacement and milliday is decent minute replacement, the metric time would be missing decent seconds replacement. The next named prefix, microday, is 86ms which is very small for humans.
Of course it is not insurmountable problem, but for lot of other units milli- tends to represent the lower end of "human scale"; millimeters, milligrams, milliliters, milliwatts, etc are as small as most people will ever use in day-to-day life.
In some ways it would be more convenient if the base unit would be e.g. 1e-4 days (or some other power of 10) so day would be 10 kilos. Understandably it would be lot less elegant but more practical. Deci- would be .86 seconds which is kinda nice.
I think what likely happens here is that everyone just starts calling 10^(-5) days (= 0.864 current seconds) a "second". (And then there's confusion over which second people mean, analogous to what happens now with tons.)
Internet time is already that: it’s UTC with the day divided into a 1000 beats/metric minutes.
Edit: Swatch internet time
There is no "Internet time": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_time
There is "Swatch Internet Time" which is UTC+1. (Wiki never refers that time as Internet Time, good that they couldn't take the term for their time.)
It seems "Internet time" is still free for someone to take, if they can.
See French Decimal Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Not to be confused with Metric Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
Timekeeping units of measurement:
I've got some cheap esp32's and small oled displays lying around for years now, I should build a Beats clock as a weekend project.
How does it handle leap seconds?
It manhadles it like a Swiss stuffed on cheese fondue and chocolate.
As it's based upon UTC+1, I imagine the same way as UTC.
This website:
> There are no confusing time zones ordaylight savings time shifts to worry about.
Also this website (and in the very next sentence - emphasis mine):
> There are exactly 1,000 .Beats in a day, making each .Beat precisely 1 minute and 26.4 seconds long.
Having a laugh.
I'm assuming this cannot be serious, otherwise get thee hence!