The
Idea
The idea for an Internet Time is attributed
to Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder and leader of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Media Laboratory.
SMH the manufacturers of the Swatch®
watches took it up and designed a series of watches displaying the
interne time together with / instead of the local time.
Since the Internet is global the
Internet Time should be the same globally:
- no time zones,
- no local deviations from time zones,
and
- no daylight saving differences.
People communicating and cooperating over the internet don't care about local times
at different places on earth. Internet
conference members are all awake and at work. Peope more and more are
permanently interconnected. Messages are sent and received throughout the
day. Different time tags
between senders and recipients only could give rise to
misunderstandings and never really are useful.
Wouldn't it be nice if conference partners
in New York, in Bangkok, Tokyo, London, and Berlin could agree upon their
next "meeting @450".
 The
Time
According to its inventors the
measure "time" should comply to international (metric) standards.
Thus a day would be made up of 10 hours of 100 minutes instead
of 2 day halfs of 12 hours, containing 60 minutes of 60 seconds each. In other
words:
- a day is divided into 1000 Beats (Swatch Beats).
- Internet Time starts with @000 und ends
with @999
(@1000 = @000).
- One beat corresponds to 1 minute and 26.4
seconds or 86.4 seconds.
The
Time Reference
The internet time reference is
defined as midnight in Biel / Switzerland, where
the Swatch / SMH group has its headquarters. Then everywhere on earth it's @000
internet time. At noon Biel local time all internet watches display @500.
This reference time is also named "Biel Mean Time", (BMT) by the
Swatch people.
The Applet
The Java applet shown in the header of this
page may be downloaded in compiled and in source code form. If
you abide to the simple rules written in the "readme" file that
accompanies the applet code you may use it for non-commercial as well as for
commercial purposes. It has been written as an extension to a ticker applet for which
the same rules apply. See the download page.
Note: At runtime the applet takes the current
time from the client workstation or PC and not from the server it is loaded
from. From this time it calculates the Biel / Switzerland local time (BMT)
and the internet time. It cannot discover whether the time on the
workstation is adjusted or not and whether the daylight savings parameters are
set appropriately. Either will result in the applet producing inaccurate
results. |
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