28 years of Internet Time

A short, honest history

1. 1793

   Paris

   The revolutionary Republic divides the day into 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. A decimal minute lasts 86.4 seconds — exactly one beat, two centuries early. The system is abandoned in 1795. Clocks with two dials survive in museums.

2. Spring 1998

   Buenos Aires

   Charly Alberti, drummer of Soda Stereo, launches i-time.com: one “Internet hour” for everyone, the day split into 1,000 parts. It gets little attention. Good ideas rarely have one inventor.

3. 23 October 1998

   Cambridge, Massachusetts

   At the Junior Summit at the MIT Media Lab, Nicolas Hayek of Swatch and Nicholas Negroponte announce Swatch Internet Time: 1,000 .beats a day, no time zones, written with an @ sign. Midnight is set to Biel Mean Time — the standard time of Swatch’s home town, UTC+1, no daylight saving. A meridian line is painted on the headquarters in Biel. Internet Time becomes the official clock of Nation.1, an online country run by children.

4. 1999

   Watches and a satellite

   Swatch sells .beat watches; CNN.com prints the beat next to its headlines. A plan to release a small “Beatnik” satellite from the Mir space station, broadcasting beats on amateur-radio frequencies, is dropped after radio amateurs object. The batteries go to Mir instead.

5. 2000–2001

   Games and phones

   Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast schedules players across continents in beats. ICQ shows them next to the clock. The Ericsson T20e can display them.

6. Mid-2000s

   Quiet

   Developers settle on UTC, ISO 8601 and Unix time. The watches are discontinued. The idea lives on as a curiosity: a page on Swatch’s website, a few fan-made apps, a Wikipedia article.

7. 2016

   A brief return

   Swatch’s Touch Zero Two smartwatch includes an Internet Time mode.

8. June 2026

   Hagen, Germany

   BeatTime: the same 1,000 beats a day, anchored to UTC instead of Biel, with an open API, an Android app and watch faces — and a public proof log that lets anyone timestamp a file to a beat and verify it without trusting us.

9. September 2026

   Sigelith

   BeatTime becomes Sigelith: the same clock, now the time base of a free proof-of-existence service — with a Windows app and proof of delivery. The Android app keeps its name.

What they got right

Three things, and they were right about all three.

1. Time zones are a coordination tax. Every remote team still pays it, 28 years later. “2 pm your time or mine?” was a real problem in 1998 and is a bigger one now.
2. A day in a thousand parts is a human number. Nobody needs to convert @500 to know it is midday. Percent of the day is a unit people already think in.
3. The notation. @523 reads the same in every language and every script. No am/pm, no colons, no month-first or day-first argument.

What we changed, and why

One thing: the midnight.

How to read it

A beat is a bit longer than a minute, so three digits are enough for the whole day. Everything before the decimal point is the same everywhere on Earth at the same instant — that is the whole point.

One hour is 41.67 beats, a quarter of an hour is about 10. So @500 means midday UTC, and “see you at @750” is six in the evening UTC, whatever the clock on your wall says.

Try it