9 ms·

Swatch Internet Time (1998)

86 points by velmu 9y ago

velmu 9y ago
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-saving-time-from-eu-mulls-timezone-switch https://metropolitan.fi/entry/finland-seeks-to-drop-daylight...
- Symbiote 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    >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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Sidenote: AFAIK, UK also uses an AM/PM format for time, instead of the unambiguous 24-hour format.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        In typically British fashion we use both quite readily.
        stordoff 9y ago
        Both are used, and it's fairly arbitrary which is used - bus/train times are usually 24-hours, general speech is usually 12-hour unless referring to something that is already in 24-hour time (but even then some people will switch them to 12-hour), and I see appointment cards, invoices etc. using both. It's definitely in keeping with how we mix meters/feet and pints/litres.
        howard941 9y ago
        From what I gather watching UK TV there's also the charming and efficient use of "half X" to refer to thirty minutes after hour X.
      - rhapsodic 9y ago
        >In Europe, most "official" times use a 24-hour clock (train schedules, etc.). Uh, yeah, I'm well aware of that, as are most Americans I know. That's why I asked about "the American assumption that everyone uses the 12-hour clock". That must be a myth that non-Americans believe in.
    - eddieroger 9y ago
      I'm an American who chooses to use a 24 hour clock for all my digital ones, anyway, and didn't realize that American assumed anything about time like that. Instead, I assumed that it's up to the user's discretion, and they would set their computer settings appropriately (or not at all, since it's probably fine as localized), and in the case of Google, the computer would rely on those localization settings, as it did for "17:30 in Denmark."
      - Symbiote 9y ago
        > I assumed that it's up to the user's discretion, and they would set their computer settings appropriately My computer is configured correctly, but it's rather common for an application (especially a phone app) or website to ignore those settings, or to think it knows better. 04:30 UTC means 04:30 UTC, or 05:30 in Denmark. Not 17:30! The same can happen if I type something like "04:30 Catch flight" into an appointment in my Google Calendar. It is converted into a new appointment "16:30 Catch flight". It's not just Google. "Your Office 365 subscription will automatically renew on 1/19/2018." and the admin interface is a mix of date and time formats.
  - michaelcampbell 9y ago
    > is the American assumption that everyone uses the 12-hour clock. C'mon, stop. So edgy.
    - _jal 9y ago
      It appears you're unaware that many routinely countries use 24 hour ("military") time for many things. It isn't quite so extreme as that edgy metric system trendiness all the kool kids seem to be in to these days, but, uh, there is a world out there.
      - michaelcampbell 9y ago
        I'm quite aware, thanks. I was talking about the reddit-esque "shit on anything done in the US" nonsense.
- endymi0n 9y ago
  So you want to abolish time zones... (I see you don't, completely, but this one's gold in any case): https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - upofadown 9y ago
    That was silly. It reminded me of one of those "where did the soda go?" infomercials in that it assumed an extreme level of incompetence on the part of the viewer. All the difficulties of the product (time zones) were ignored while all the difficulties of alternative ways of doing things were exaggerated past the point of possible satire.
    - mseebach 9y ago
      It doesn't purport to give a balanced analysis of pros and cons, it's a (tongue-in-cheek) outline of the downsides that proponents of timezone abolishment never seem to consider. Perhaps the writing is silly, but there's nothing silly about the point the point that of course people will maintain the solar day for daily life, and abolishing timezones will basically break time for most people (especially those whose "midnight" (and so the changing of the date and name of day) will land during the solar day).
      - upofadown 9y ago
        Whatever happens, the solar day stays the same. Time zones actually break the solar day. Freed from the constraints of time zones the solar day becomes its own thing. DST is just an ugly hack piled on top of the mess time zones created in an attempt to go back a ways to solar time.
        mseebach 9y ago
        No, DST has nothing at all to do with solar time. It's a hack alright, but it's not fixing any problem introduced by time zones.
        9y ago
- niftich 9y ago
  Swatch Internet Time and UTC solve the same problem: they both present a timezone- and locale-agnostic, almost-monotonous scale that's two-ways convertible with local times. Except UTC is more natural to reason about, because it looks like a local timestamp, and some people can do offset math in their head to approximate the real answer. You have to do much more conversions between Swatch Internet Time and local time, so you always need a tool. The applicability of timestamp conventions for setting business meetings is largely dependent on how easily one can look up the same moment across multiple IANA timezones [1]. For example, looking up how typical local working hours cascade between different timezones [2]. If multi-converters like this became mainstream, Swatch Internet Time may very well have been a hit. But it wasn't, and such a tool, even for UTC, remains hard to find. [1] https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones [2] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20180206&p1=179&p2=240&p3=102 https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...
dang 9y ago
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
gaius 9y ago
Another Negroponte boondoggle. The second is an SI unit fully integrated with the metric system.
- kragen 9y ago
  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.)
jgrahamc 9y ago
If people want a timezone-less universal time reference they can use UTC and none of that AM/PM BS.
- endymi0n 9y ago
  (which has the two big advantages of being counted in standard intergalactic minutes instead of fractional ones and usually having an easy to calculate constant whole hour difference to the time zone you live in, barring few exceptions)
- princekolt 9y ago
  I've thought about that in the past, but it is hard to lose the association we have of noon being during daylight, and midnight being during, well, night. While these were somewhat arbitrary when they were invented, we have now simply internalized that "this is how it is". So I think it does make sense to move away from the Hour-Minute nomenclature if we want a single global time for daily use, even if only for the sake of not confusing our dumb brains.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    The point is that "we" don't want a single global time, for those reasons you mention among many others. GPs point (as I understood it) is that those (relatively few) who need global coordination can just use UTC (and most already do, eg. aviation runs largely on UTC).
- dingaling 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
davidmr 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago
pcora 9y ago
Wow, I had one of these in 2005: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedro/59521558/in/photolist-6g4FL https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedro/59521558/in/photolist-6g... Never found an use for it since no one had the watch and neither knew about 'Internet Time'
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I had one! We should have been friends :'(
tinbucket 9y ago
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_ 9y ago
  The Sci Fi channel had an IRC?
  - Cyberdog 9y ago
    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.
DanBC 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Looking further back, it was present in Phantasy Star Online!
- stordoff 9y ago
  Giant Bomb used it for a while (half-jokingly IIRC) for listing their livestream times (alongside traditional Eastern Time listings).
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  I imagine it would be simpler to just use Unix time, which is already time zone agnostic.
tzahola 9y ago
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.
PokemonNoGo 9y ago
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...
pentagonpapers 9y ago
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

86 points by velmu 9y ago

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

Symbiote 9y ago
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 9y ago
  >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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Sidenote: AFAIK, UK also uses an AM/PM format for time, instead of the unambiguous 24-hour format.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        In typically British fashion we use both quite readily.
      - stordoff 9y ago
        Both are used, and it's fairly arbitrary which is used - bus/train times are usually 24-hours, general speech is usually 12-hour unless referring to something that is already in 24-hour time (but even then some people will switch them to 12-hour), and I see appointment cards, invoices etc. using both. It's definitely in keeping with how we mix meters/feet and pints/litres.
      - howard941 9y ago
        From what I gather watching UK TV there's also the charming and efficient use of "half X" to refer to thirty minutes after hour X.
    - rhapsodic 9y ago
      >In Europe, most "official" times use a 24-hour clock (train schedules, etc.). Uh, yeah, I'm well aware of that, as are most Americans I know. That's why I asked about "the American assumption that everyone uses the 12-hour clock". That must be a myth that non-Americans believe in.
  - eddieroger 9y ago
    I'm an American who chooses to use a 24 hour clock for all my digital ones, anyway, and didn't realize that American assumed anything about time like that. Instead, I assumed that it's up to the user's discretion, and they would set their computer settings appropriately (or not at all, since it's probably fine as localized), and in the case of Google, the computer would rely on those localization settings, as it did for "17:30 in Denmark."
    - Symbiote 9y ago
      > I assumed that it's up to the user's discretion, and they would set their computer settings appropriately My computer is configured correctly, but it's rather common for an application (especially a phone app) or website to ignore those settings, or to think it knows better. 04:30 UTC means 04:30 UTC, or 05:30 in Denmark. Not 17:30! The same can happen if I type something like "04:30 Catch flight" into an appointment in my Google Calendar. It is converted into a new appointment "16:30 Catch flight". It's not just Google. "Your Office 365 subscription will automatically renew on 1/19/2018." and the admin interface is a mix of date and time formats.
- michaelcampbell 9y ago
  > is the American assumption that everyone uses the 12-hour clock. C'mon, stop. So edgy.
  - _jal 9y ago
    It appears you're unaware that many routinely countries use 24 hour ("military") time for many things. It isn't quite so extreme as that edgy metric system trendiness all the kool kids seem to be in to these days, but, uh, there is a world out there.
    - michaelcampbell 9y ago
      I'm quite aware, thanks. I was talking about the reddit-esque "shit on anything done in the US" nonsense.
endymi0n 9y ago
So you want to abolish time zones... (I see you don't, completely, but this one's gold in any case): https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- upofadown 9y ago
  That was silly. It reminded me of one of those "where did the soda go?" infomercials in that it assumed an extreme level of incompetence on the part of the viewer. All the difficulties of the product (time zones) were ignored while all the difficulties of alternative ways of doing things were exaggerated past the point of possible satire.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    It doesn't purport to give a balanced analysis of pros and cons, it's a (tongue-in-cheek) outline of the downsides that proponents of timezone abolishment never seem to consider. Perhaps the writing is silly, but there's nothing silly about the point the point that of course people will maintain the solar day for daily life, and abolishing timezones will basically break time for most people (especially those whose "midnight" (and so the changing of the date and name of day) will land during the solar day).
    - upofadown 9y ago
      Whatever happens, the solar day stays the same. Time zones actually break the solar day. Freed from the constraints of time zones the solar day becomes its own thing. DST is just an ugly hack piled on top of the mess time zones created in an attempt to go back a ways to solar time.
      - mseebach 9y ago
        No, DST has nothing at all to do with solar time. It's a hack alright, but it's not fixing any problem introduced by time zones.
        9y ago
niftich 9y ago
Swatch Internet Time and UTC solve the same problem: they both present a timezone- and locale-agnostic, almost-monotonous scale that's two-ways convertible with local times. Except UTC is more natural to reason about, because it looks like a local timestamp, and some people can do offset math in their head to approximate the real answer. You have to do much more conversions between Swatch Internet Time and local time, so you always need a tool. The applicability of timestamp conventions for setting business meetings is largely dependent on how easily one can look up the same moment across multiple IANA timezones [1]. For example, looking up how typical local working hours cascade between different timezones [2]. If multi-converters like this became mainstream, Swatch Internet Time may very well have been a hit. But it wasn't, and such a tool, even for UTC, remains hard to find. [1] https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones [2] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20180206&p1=179&p2=240&p3=102 https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...

dang 9y ago

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

gaius 9y ago

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

kragen 9y ago
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.)

jgrahamc 9y ago

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

endymi0n 9y ago
(which has the two big advantages of being counted in standard intergalactic minutes instead of fractional ones and usually having an easy to calculate constant whole hour difference to the time zone you live in, barring few exceptions)
princekolt 9y ago
I've thought about that in the past, but it is hard to lose the association we have of noon being during daylight, and midnight being during, well, night. While these were somewhat arbitrary when they were invented, we have now simply internalized that "this is how it is". So I think it does make sense to move away from the Hour-Minute nomenclature if we want a single global time for daily use, even if only for the sake of not confusing our dumb brains.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The point is that "we" don't want a single global time, for those reasons you mention among many others. GPs point (as I understood it) is that those (relatively few) who need global coordination can just use UTC (and most already do, eg. aviation runs largely on UTC).
dingaling 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

davidmr 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- 9y ago

pcora 9y ago

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

StavrosK 9y ago
I had one! We should have been friends :'(

tinbucket 9y ago

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_ 9y ago
The Sci Fi channel had an IRC?
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  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.

DanBC 9y ago

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 9y ago
Looking further back, it was present in Phantasy Star Online!
stordoff 9y ago
Giant Bomb used it for a while (half-jokingly IIRC) for listing their livestream times (alongside traditional Eastern Time listings).
Cyberdog 9y ago
I imagine it would be simpler to just use Unix time, which is already time zone agnostic.

tzahola 9y ago

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.

PokemonNoGo 9y ago

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...

pentagonpapers 9y ago

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