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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

There's also the ill-fated Swatch Internet Time, which was a decimal system that divided the day into 1,000 beats and no time zones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

They even sold physical watches with this design.

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Decimal time isn't great because it doesn't divide into thirds. I like Swatch Internet Time as a retro novelty, but I consider New Earth Time the more practical take on the same idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Earth_Time. It's based on UTC and splits the day into 360 degrees.

And not just thirds, decimal doesn't divide into quarters either.

Swatch Beats was a decimal system of 1000 beats a day. You can divide 1000 into 4 x 250 beats.

It looks like a poorly thought-out marketing project. For example, how to deal with the Earth rotation irregularity and leap seconds? One beat is way too long to correct with, so the correction has to be in centibeats, fractions of beat, inconvenient. Why would this in CET and not in UTC? Aligning start of the day with the existing customs seems beneficial.

But the idea of the universal decimal time is a nice one. I wish we had something like that.

> It looks like a poorly thought-out marketing project. For example, how to deal with the Earth rotation irregularity and leap seconds?

Most people don't care about those things though. How does a Casio watch deal with leap seconds? How does a Rolex deal with them? The barrier to adoption is going to be social and not some obscure technical objection by the IAU.

Rolex and Casio deal with simply when IERS introduces one.

Beats is a new time measurement system, not just a new clock. So if the world (IERS) would stops it, they would have to have new rules for dealing with leap “micro-days” or “mili-beats”.

And second is the fundamental SI constant, quite a bit of stuff is derived from it.

I feel like it was sooooo close to catching on, but basing it on CET instead of UTC made it a bit too clearly tongue-in-cheek. That also torpedoed its main user-base, which I always thought was sysadmins.

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