Swatch Internet Time: what .beat was, and what it is now
We are not Swatch. “Swatch”, “Internet Time” and “.beat” are trademarks of their owner. BeatTime is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Swatch AG. This page describes their idea and says plainly where our clock differs from it.
In 1998 a watch company proposed that the whole planet read the same number at the same moment. The idea was better than its execution — and the part that was broken is fixable.
What it was
Swatch launched Internet Time in October 1998, at the height of the belief that the internet would dissolve borders. The day was divided into 1000 beats instead of 24 hours, written with an at sign: @000 at the start of the day, @999 at the end. No timezones, no a.m. and p.m., no summer time. Two people in different countries would name a meeting hour with the same three digits.
- 1 beat
- 86.4 seconds — one minute and 26.4 seconds.
- A day
- 1000 beats, counted from @000 upwards, with no hours in between.
- The anchor
- Biel Mean Time — the local time of Biel, the Swiss town where Swatch has its seat. It equals UTC+1 and never changes for summer.
How to read it
A beat is a bit longer than a minute, so three digits are enough for the whole day. Everything before the decimal point is the same everywhere on Earth at the same instant — that is the whole point.
| UTC | .beat |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | @000 |
| 03:00 | @125 |
| 06:00 | @250 |
| 09:00 | @375 |
| 12:00 | @500 |
| 15:00 | @625 |
| 18:00 | @750 |
| 21:00 | @875 |
| 23:59 | @999 |
One hour is 41.67 beats, a quarter of an hour is about 10. So @500 means midday UTC, and “see you at @750” is six in the evening UTC, whatever the clock on your wall says.
Why it did not catch on
Not because people are attached to timezones. The reasons were more mundane, and it is worth naming them honestly:
- The anchor was a timezone in disguise. A clock that abolishes timezones cannot start its day at midnight in one particular Swiss town. Everybody outside that hour had to accept somebody else's local noon — which is exactly what the idea promised to end.
- It was a product, not a standard. There was no specification to implement, no time server to query and no library in anybody's toolchain — there were watches to buy.
- Computers already had UTC. Engineers had a universal clock that worked, was standardised and was already wired into everything. A second universal clock had to offer more than a different notation.
- The moment passed. Internet Time was bound to a particular year's enthusiasm. When the enthusiasm cooled, the marketing stopped, and with it the only thing keeping the notation in front of people.
Who kept using it
It never entirely died. Online games with players spread across the world used beats to announce events, because a single number saved everyone a conversion — Phantasy Star Online did it in 2000, and the habit outlived the console. A handful of phones and chat clients offered a beat display. Collectors still wear the watches, and hobby programmers still write beat clocks, which is roughly how we got here too.
What we changed
Our clock is anchored to UTC, not to Biel. That is the one change everything else follows from — and it means our reading is 41.67 beats behind a 1998 Swatch watch at the same instant.
We say this plainly because you would find it in a minute by holding the two clocks side by side. A universal time anchored to one town's midnight was the flaw in the original; UTC belongs to nobody, which is the property the idea needed from the start.
- Centibeats. When a beat is too coarse, the reading continues after the decimal point: @523.45. A centibeat is 0.864 of a second.
- A written specification and a free API. Anyone can query the time, convert both ways or embed the clock, without a key and without an account — the infrastructure the original never had.
- Something built on top. The same clock stamps files, so you can prove a document existed at a given beat. That is the part a notation alone could never do.
- Nothing to sell. There is no watch here. The clock, the apps and the API are free, and the project is paid for by people who choose to support it.