Swatch proposes replacing hours, minutes and time zones with 1,000 universal daily beats—measured from the Swiss watchmaker’s own headquarters.
The internet needed a universal clock. Swatch volunteered its address.
On Friday, 23 October 1998, the world received a new way to tell time.
It did not have hours.
It did not have minutes.
It did not have time zones.
It did, however, have Swatch headquarters at the centre of everything.
The Swiss watchmaker called its proposal Internet Time. Instead of dividing a day into twenty-four hours, it divided the same day into 1,000 units called .beats.
One beat lasted 86.4 ordinary seconds. Midnight became @000, halfway through the day became @500, and the final moments before the next day approached @999.
The attraction was simple. A person in New York and a person in Rome could agree to meet online at the same @time without converting between local clocks.
There was only one universal reference: Biel Mean Time, or BMT.
Biel was not Greenwich, an astronomical observatory or the headquarters of an international standards organization. It was the Swiss city where Swatch was based.
The company inaugurated its BMT meridian on 23 October in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. Swatch produced watches capable of displaying the new system, while websites showed the current number of beats.
Contemporary supporters presented Internet Time as a natural system for a borderless digital world.
Standards specialists noticed a minor implementation issue.
For Internet Time to replace conventional civil time, humanity would need to alter the faces—and probably the mechanisms—of nearly every clock on Earth.
Swatch had not yet secured endorsement from the international bodies responsible for timekeeping standards.
The proposal never displaced hours, minutes or time zones. Its @notation survives as a wonderfully confident artifact of the late-1990s internet: a watch company looked at thousands of years of timekeeping and concluded that the principal problem was insufficient branding.
The internet did receive one global clock.
It began at midnight in Biel.
A watchmaker tried to eliminate time zones, replace the twenty-four-hour day with 1,000 branded beats and make its own Swiss headquarters the reference point for global internet time.
Swatch synchronized the planet. The planet kept its other clocks.