Swatch Internet Time
Sometimes I run across a thing so odd that it makes me wonder if I slipped into an alternate world. Today’s example:
Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.
Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit ’98 attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.