
Swatch Internet Time (1998) - velmu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
======
davidmr
This wasn't the first time someone tried to make something better than time
zones and our silly days-weeks-months-years system, and I doubt it will be the
last. It probably goes back much further, but I know that the French tried to
decimalize time in the revolution when they were rationalizing all the other
measurements. (see _The Measure of All Things_ by Ken Alder, without question
the finest nonfiction book Ive ever read.)

The reason I think it doesn't catch on is that what we have really isn't too
bad. If I'm thinking locally, everything works perfectly. If I'm trying to
schedule a meeting with my colleagues in Singapore, I just remember a single
number, 14 and apply it to my time. I know that right this minute, it's 21:40
in Singapore, and I know that the sun is down, everyone is home and preparing
to go to bed. With UTC, I have to remember that the sun rises at 23:00UTC, do
a little math, figure people show up in the office around three hours after
the sunrise, etc. Toss in offices in London, Shanghai, Cape Town, Melbourne,
etc. and it gets confusing.

Modulo 24 math is simple enough that anyone can do it, and looking up the
offset for a city is much easier than finding out a "normal" person's schedule
in that city.

Yes of course it gets a little silly with edge cases around DST and strange
places (good trivia question: with what city does the South Pole share its
time zone? A: Auckland, NZ, where the logistics are handled or anywhere in NZ
really), but it works 99% of the time.

Could we make it work if we just decided to? Of course! Implementing the
metric system was much harder, and we did that (well, most of us did, of
course) because there were huge benefits to being on the same measure. Are
there equally huge benefits to being on the same time zone? I doubt it.

~~~
mseebach
It's a near-perfect instance of Chesterton's fence:
[https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-
down/](https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/)

Also, I don't think the comparison with the metric system is apt. It took a
pretty intuitive system and replaced it with another slightly less intuitive
system, but which is vastly easier to use for a large number of tasks that a
large number of people need to do frequently (specifically, arithmetic on
measurements). Timezone abolishers will bring about benefits that only a very
small number of people will enjoy, while causing very significant confusion to
practically everybody.

~~~
taejo
What about customary measurements was more intuitive than metric?

~~~
oldcynic
They tend to be easier to visualise stemming from so many having root in human
scale. For instance an inch is the width of a thumb - it'll match scale on
many common charts so easy approximation of distance. (one of many dubious
claims of the origin of "rule of thumb")

A foot consists of 4 palms or 12 thumbs (inches). A fathom is distance of arms
outstretched (6') and so it goes on. Many fractions and multiples can easily
be achieved without resorting to scale or rule.

You can trace all the way back to Egyptian/Roman times though many had their
standard size fiddled with over the years. The German foot was a bit longer, a
French pound (livre) a little heavier etc.

Of course if you're mucking about in a globalised world with software, or
engines, satellites and suchlike SI units are a much better bet.

~~~
taejo
OK, I'll concede that on length measures between one inch and one fathom,
customary measurements might have an intuition advantage (and indeed, I've
been known to measure things with my own feet before converting to metres).

Once we get to miles, I don't think that those have any advantage over
kilometres (of course, we could have a hybrid system with kiloyards, to get
the advantages of both).

And what about fahrenheit and pounds?

~~~
mseebach
Fahrenheit is "tighter" and has a better resolution in the "human" range --
ie. 0-100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the range of temperatures that humans
can exist in, and one degree celcius is a bit too coarse for human comfort,
thermostats generally give you at least half degrees celcius precision, but
can get by with only whole degrees fahrenheit.

~~~
Moru
We can discuss all sorts of reasons why one system is better than the other
one but the worst situation is to have more than one system to measure the
same thing. Measuring longer distances by foot instead of meters makes the
error bigger. Many small feet adds small amounts of errors on each foot. One
meter is an average step so less errors that adds up.

Choose one and stick to it :-) Customary xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
tinbucket
I remember this being a minor fad around this when I had my first, handcoded
website hosted on the 5MB of webspace my dial-up ISP gave me. I'm pretty sure
I heard about it from one of the other regulars on irc.scifi.com, the Sci-Fi
Channel's IRC server that I used to frequent.

With a little cut-and-paste of some code from Swatch's website you could have
a GIF 'clock' on your site that showed the 'internet time' to your visitors.
Utterly pointless, but harmless fun.

~~~
voltagex_
The Sci Fi channel had an IRC?

~~~
Cyberdog
Apple had an IRC server too. It seemed to be one of the kinds of servers that
many companies had back in the day, perhaps sitting next to their Gopher
server.

------
jgrahamc
If people want a timezone-less universal time reference they can use UTC and
none of that AM/PM BS.

~~~
dingaling
For trivia, one oddity about UTC is that an epoch is not finalised until about
12 days after it occurs, due to the 'C' aspect of the acronym.

Not normally an issue for average users, but yet another disadvantage of a
non-absolute time scale. And a reason why people keep trying to reinvent
measures of time.

~~~
phicoh
I'm curious what measures you refer to. There are practical approaches that
are in common use. For example GPS is synced to UTC(USNO). But nobody tries to
promote that as a universal time scale.

~~~
tialaramex
No, GPS doesn't track UTC, it would be a huge pain to do that.

GPS tracks TAI, because TAI is an Atomic Time, it doesn't care about how the
Earth moves in space. Some of the metadata transmitted alongside the GPS
signal tells a device how to turn GPS time into UTC at the current moment in
case you want to display that, but it's orthogonal to the main purpose of GPS
which is to figure out where you are, for which you want a nice steady time
system like TAI, not a civil system like UTC.

The way UTC works is, moment by moment it goes at the same speed as TAI, but
every six months it might jump back or forward one second, to try to keep it
roughly lined up with UT1. This is a compromise to give TAI's simplicity and
reliability (atomic clocks are easy) but without gradually shifting away from
UT1 over decades.

Why? Well, UT1 reflects the thing humans think "days" are about, the uneven
wobbly spin of Earth, the big round thing we're almost all stuck to. If the
Earth spins a little more slowly or quickly than expected, that's reflected in
UT1 but doesn't affect TAI at all.

~~~
phicoh
Technically GPS cannot track TAI because TAI is not available in real time.
You can compute TAI from UTC, but as mentioned above UTC is only created many
days after the fact.

So in practice, you have to rely on what national labs provide. They provide
time that is close to UTC but is not actually UTC, in the case of GPS they use
the approximation of UTC by the US Naval Laboratories.

Now because UTC is the official civil time, and it is easy enough to compute
TAI from UTC, what such labs provide is UTC.

Then internally, GPS translates that to GPS time. Which differs from TAI by 19
seconds.

------
tzahola
Oh, I remember watching Discovery Channel with my dad around 1999, and some
Swatch PR guy was talking about how the Internet Generation (tm) will embrace
this new Internet Time (r) standard. I was around 8 years old, but I remember
thinking how ridiculous of a "solution" this was for a non-existing problem.
Just use UTC.

------
dang
Two previous threads had comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7046178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7046178)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520004)

------
velmu
I think the time would be ripe time for a second try at this . It's something
tweaks to DST and Timezones* wont fix.

I still struggle figuring out times globally, without good reason. Local time
could still be the regular 24h, but for business meetings, etc. something like
Swatch Internet Time would be great.

* [https://metropolitan.fi/entry/finland-seeks-to-drop-daylight...](https://metropolitan.fi/entry/finland-seeks-to-drop-daylight-saving-time-from-eu-mulls-timezone-switch)

~~~
Symbiote
What problem does Swatch Internet Time solve?

> for business meetings, etc. something like Swatch Internet Time would be
> great

Let's discuss this on 2018-06-07 at 04:30, UTC.

I thought Google would be the easiest source for a conversion, but for me a
search for "04:30 UTC" gives a banner at the top, "17.30 Tuesday, in Denmark":
[https://www.google.dk/search?q=04%3A30+UTC](https://www.google.dk/search?q=04%3A30+UTC)

So maybe one problem it solves, is the American assumption that everyone uses
the 12-hour clock.

~~~
rhapsodic
_> So maybe one problem it solves, is the American assumption that everyone
uses the 12-hour clock._

I'm an American, and I was not aware of the "American assumption that everyone
uses the 12-hour clock." Please elaborate further.

~~~
ams6110
In Europe, most "official" times use a 24-hour clock (train schedules, etc.).
This is almost never seen in America outside of the military and many
Americans would need to stop and calculate what time "17:30" is.

~~~
znpy
Sidenote: AFAIK, UK also uses an AM/PM format for time, instead of the
unambiguous 24-hour format.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In typically British fashion we use both quite readily.

------
pcora
Wow, I had one of these in 2005:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedro/59521558/in/photolist-6g...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedro/59521558/in/photolist-6g4FL)
Never found an use for it since no one had the watch and neither knew about
'Internet Time'

~~~
StavrosK
I had one! We should have been friends :'(

------
DanBC
I'm kind of surprised that Minecraft didn't take this.

Inter-continental multiplayer or livestreaming is made easier if you don't
have to convert timezones.

~~~
lfowles
Looking further back, it was present in Phantasy Star Online!

------
pentagonpapers
The last person who tried to change the calendar got his head chopped off.
Literally:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Romme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Romme)

------
PokemonNoGo
Used to have this display on my, very cool, Ericsson T20 as its clock in the
year 2000. It was kinda fun to try to learn it. It also had a tiny full qwerty
keyboard accessory. A true marvel...

------
gaius
Another Negroponte boondoggle. The second is an SI unit fully integrated with
the metric system.

~~~
kragen
I used to think that a few hundred megaseconds ago, but after gaining a few
more tens of megaseconds of experience with the SI, I realized that, in
practice, we continue using Babylonian sexagesimal units for time, not SI
units.

(It may be pointless to reply to a comment that's already several kiloseconds
old on here, I know, but hopefully at least a few dekapersons will read my
reply and enjoy it.)

