This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
And it was always portrayed as a solution for arranging meetings for you and your friends or business people on the other side of planet.
I think the other idea from these times was abolishing phone numbers and using unified global email-like identifiers. And in a way we got this on social media - some people use same account names everywhere - not mention keybase, and we also have instant messengers on smartphones in our pockets.
This was also marketing driven, it seems.
Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)
"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."
https://web.archive.org/web/20021208112249/http://www.sega.c...
Thank you for helping me discover the source of this little brainwurm.
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
The API shows a unambiguous timestamp, which is the exact same value I see for your comment: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46958592
> created_at: "2026-02-10T12:03:56.000Z"