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Could be worse. Swatch tried "Swatch beats" in 1999.[1] A day is divided into 1000 parts. There are no time zones. The zero meridian is at Swatch HQ in Switzerland. (They could have used UTC, but no. "Beats" are UTC+1.)

Swatch sold watches with this, but not very many of them.[2]

[1] http://www.swatch.com/en_us/internet-time [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

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Hilariously, PHP supports this on its date/time formatting functions: http://php.net/manual/en/function.idate.php

The Dreamcast game Phantasy Star Online kept time using Swatch beats! I think the idea was to help players around the world synchronize their gaming.

Is that what that "Online Time" in the corner of the menu was? I would see it counting at roughly every minute and a half, but never realized it was Swatch Time!

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