The .Beat Goes On
By the late 1990s, the Swiss watchmaker Swatch was riding high on a streak of 15 years of skyrocketing popularity. So much so that Swatch apparently believed it could not only measure time but also define it. In 1998, the company made a hard push to sell the public on an odd timekeeping system known as Swatch Internet Time (AKA .beat time). Obviously, that went over about as well as their watch sales did for the next 20 years, but it is an interesting piece of early internet history all the same.
Instead of hours, minutes, time zones, and daylight saving time, the company proposed dividing every day into 1,000 equal units called ".beats". Each .beat lasts 86.4 seconds, with the current time written as a number preceded by an @ symbol. For example, @500 is halfway through an Internet Time day. There are no time zones to convert between,...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackster.io. To see the full text click HERE
