Swatch Internet Time

Swatch Internet Time was announced on 23 October 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, president and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, president of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then director of the MIT Media Lab. During the summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation.1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children. Uses During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch, branded "Swatch ", that displayed Swatch Internet Time as well as standard time, and even convinced a few websites (such as CNN.com) to use the new format.{{cite web Beatnik satellite controversy In early 1999, Swatch began a marketing campaign about the launch of their Beatnik satellite, intended to service a set of Internet Time watches. They were criticized for planning to use an amateur radio frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties). The satellite was intended to be deployed by hand from the Mir space station. Swatch instead donated the transmitter batteries for use in normal Mir functions, and the satellite never broadcast.{{cite news ==Description==

The concept was touted as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the supposed goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether. It also does away with the division of the day into 12 or 24 parts (hours), then 60 parts (minutes), then 60 parts (seconds), then 1000 parts (milliseconds). Furthermore, there is no confusion between the AM/PM system and 24-hour time. Beats Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called ''''. Each lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. One is equal to one decimal minute in French decimal time. Although Swatch does not specify units smaller than one , third party implementations have extended the standard by adding "centibeats" or "sub-beats", for extended precision: @248.00. Each "centibeat" is a hundredth of a and is therefore equal to one French decimal second (0.864 seconds).{{cite web Time zones There are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company's headquarters in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time at the Biel/Bienne meridian (7°15′E), but to the standard time there. It is equivalent to Central European Time and West Africa Time, or UTC+1. Like UTC, Swatch Internet Time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 , or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo. Unlike civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time, and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and Spain's Canary Islands during summer. Notation The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation; as an example, "@248" would indicate a time 248  after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 04:57:07.2 UTC. No explicit format was provided for dates, although the Swatch website formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (e.g. d31.01.99). Calculation from UTC+1 The formula for calculating the time in from UTC+1 is: \left\lfloor\frac{3600h+60m+s}{86.4}\right\rfloor, Where h is UTC+1 hours and m is UTC+1 minutes. The result is rounded down.{{cite web Start of the day Example cities across the globe at @000 (midnight): ==See also==