Swatch Internet Time

Swatch Internet Time is a concept introduced in 1998 and 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, and equal to the decimal minute introduced after the French Revolution. There are no time zones; instead, the new 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, or UTC+1. However, unlike the regular time in most countries, Swatch does not have Daylight Saving Time and thus it matches the central European countries during winter and the United Kingdom during summer. If it were to use UTC, it would match the clock time in the UK during winter, but would not match any important territories during summer.

Related Topics:
Swatch - Time - Hour - Minute - Second - Decimal minute - French Revolution - Time zone - Biel, Switzerland - Solar time - Meridian - Central European Time - UTC - Daylight Saving Time - United Kingdom

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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: @248.000. No explicit format was provided for dates, although the Swatch website displays the Gregorian calendar date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (d31.01.99).

Related Topics:
Notation - Third-party - Decimal - Date - Website - Gregorian calendar - Day - Month - Year

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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.

Related Topics:
New York - Tokyo

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0.875 imes 24mbox{ hours} = 21:00mbox{ BMT} = 20:00mbox{ UTC}

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Its novelty and ease of use makes the decimal time system more attractive for some people than the traditional Babylonian system of time reckoning (24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds). For example, if one learned some event took 5500 .beats to complete, it would be obvious that it happened over five and a half days. On the other hand, if one learned that an event took place over 132 hours, its duration is not immediately obvious without some form of calculation.

Related Topics:
Decimal time - Babylon

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