Swatch Internet Time

In 1998 Swatch launched a measure of time with no zones: the day divided into a thousand beats, written with an at sign, from at 000 to at 999. The promise was arranging times online without conversion — if everyone used beats, at 500 would be at 500 the world over. ICQ showed the beat next to the clock, and a few online games used it to schedule events across regions.

A beat lasts 86.4 seconds, which is the day divided by a thousand. The reference is Biel Mean Time, fixed at UTC plus one hour, where at 000 is midnight in Biel, the Swiss town where Swatch is based. Since BMT has no daylight saving, it matches Swiss local time in winter and runs an hour behind it in summer — a detail nobody notices until they try to arrange a meeting in Switzerland using beats.

The idea never caught on, for a reason that says more about time zones than about Swatch: the real problem in scheduling across continents is not converting a number, it is knowing what time it is for the other person. A global unit removes the conversion and the useful information with it — at 500 does not tell you it is the middle of the night at the other end. The unit survives in niches, and the page converts both ways.