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Story: Swatch Internet Time

Gather up, kids, near the fire. Let it make you warm. Here is the story about some very interesting concept, that I have thought will change on how we correlate logs forever, but it has not been so.

Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of ".beat" watches. Those without a watch can use the Internet to view the current time on the watchmaker's website. The concept is actually the same as decimal minutes in French Revolutionary decimal time.

From Wikipedia.

Imagine, that now you need to correlate time between many machines and these logs come from various timezones. Different timezones might be due to lack of order, managing different subsidiaries of the company, or any other reason. Usually the first thing you have to do is to understand how to map time from each one.

Imagine a world, where you could schedule an online meeting without playing timezone football.

Imagine...

The lesson: you (I) never know what are the good ideas and bad ideas looking to the future. It is easier to make predictions about the past.

What do you think about such time representation? Why do you think it was not adopted? Why are we not trying to adopt this or similar time for the internet now or in the future?

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