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. Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Swatch is a brand of stylish quartz watches (some available in Automatic) produced by The Swatch Group Ltd. ... A pocket watch, a device used to tell time Look up time in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A time zone is a region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. ...

Description

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. 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. 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. However, unlike civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time and thus it matches Central European Time during winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the UK, Ireland and Portugal, during summer. The hour (symbol: h) is a unit of time. ... A minute is a unit of time equal to 1/60th of an hour and to 60 seconds. ... Look up second in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... French decimal clock from the time of the French Revolution Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. ... The French Revolution (1789–1815) was a period of political and social upheaval in the political history of France and Europe as a whole, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based on... Location within Switzerland Biel/Bienne is a city in the Canton of Bern in Switzerland. ... Solar time is based on the idea that when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, it is noon. ... On the earth, a meridian is a north-south line between the North Pole and the South Pole. ... Time zones of Europe: Light colours indicate countries not observing summer time Central European Time (CET) is one of the names of the time zone that is 1 hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time. ... Time zones of Africa: Striped colours indicate countries observing daylight saving West Africa Time, or WAT, is a time zone used in western and west-central Africa (though not in countries west of Benin, which instead use GMT). ... ... Though DST is common in Europe and North America, most of the worlds people do not use it. ... BST redirects here. ...

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. 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 fraction, for extended precision: @248.00. 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). The term notation can be used in several contexts. ... In a two-party system a third party is a party other than the two dominant ones. ... The decimal (base ten or occasionally denary) numeral system has ten as its base. ... Note that this article includes some hyperlinked dates whose format is configurable in Special pages | Preferences. What you see may not be what the author intended. ... A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos and other digital assets and hosted on a particular domain or subdomain on the World Wide Web. ... The Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world. ... Look up day in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up Month in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A year (from Old English gēr) is the time between two recurrences of an event related to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. ...

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. NY redirects here. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

With its decimal character the time system is supposed to be more attractive for some people than the traditional Babylonian system of time units (24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds). For example, if one learned some event took 5500 .beats to complete, it would be easy to see that it happened over five and a half days. But if one learned that an event took place over 132 hours, its duration in days would be less obvious. On the other hand, converting Internet Time to and from local standard times is more complicated than it is for UTC, which usually requires only the addition or subtraction of whole hours, or sometimes half-hours, and a beat is not divisible by a whole number of seconds. Babylon (in Arabic: بابل; in Syriac: ܒܒܙܠ in Hebrew:בבל) was an ancient city in Mesopotamia (modern Al Hillah, Iraq), the ruins of which can be found in present-day Babil Province, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Baghdad. ...

History

The timescale was announced on 23 October 1998, in a ceremony attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, 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. October 23 is the 296th day of the year (297th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean [1]. // Coated in ice, power and telephone lines sag and often break, resulting in power outages. ... Born in 1928, Nicolas G. Hayek is the Lebanese co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group, with principal Headquarters in Biel-Bienne. ... Nicholas Negroponte Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is an architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab. ... The building interior near the entrance The MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in education and research in the digital technology used for expression and communication. ...

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 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 Sega 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. CNN.com is the news website maintained by CNN. The website debuted on August 30, 1995, and it describes itself as the first major news and information website on the Internet. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... PHP (PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor) is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. ... ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, owned by Time Warners AOL subsidiary. ... This article is about games in which one plays the role of a character. ... Phantasy Star Online (PSO) was an online title for Sega Dreamcast released in 2000. ... The Dreamcast , code-named Dural, Dricas and Katana during development) is Segas fifth and final video game console and the successor to the Sega Saturn. ... March is the third month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar and one of seven Gregorian months with the length of 31 days. ... 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Lars Magnus Ericsson Ericsson () NASDAQ: ERIC. Founded in 1876, Ericsson is a leading provider of communications networks, related services and handset technology platforms. ...

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. [1]

See also

• Decimal time
• French Republican Calendar
• UTC
• New Earth Time

French decimal clock from the time of the French Revolution Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. ... A French Revolutionary Calendar in the Historical Museum of Lausanne. ... ... New Earth Time (or NET) is an alternative system for measuring the time of day, independently of local time. ...

External links

• Swatch Internet Time
• Swatch Internet Time brochure (PDF)
• A short description of Internet time
• The Rise and Fall of Internet Time Archive.org link
• Swatch Internet Time Converter and Display
• Description of Swatch Internet Time and Models that have it
• Ericsson T20e with Internet Time