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Swatch Internet Time - Wikipedia
This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time mightāve succeeded if they had been a liāl bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.
If they had tied it to å» time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of ābeatsā, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasnāt meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe weād have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which wouldāve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an āopen standardā.
The fact that they also illegally planned to broadcast over ham bands was also a pretty bad nail in the coffin, along with the hypermedialized and dorky overuse of @ and dot prefixes.
As many 180Ės and life-changing, opinion mind blows as Iāve experienced in my life as an old, this isnāt one of them because I had the exact same take then: really liked it and felt it was a missed opportunity squandered by the same two criticism I have now: The UTC+1 thing is dumb (itās not that big of a dealāand great for Swedes) and itās too blatantly corporate and the ā.beatā (dot beat) unit name is embarrassing. I was a teenager, more critical and less gullible than I am now. We all saw that it was just a dorky watch ad campaign, quickly abandoned by its own makers.
Meanwhile, here we are in a mess of timezones and DST and I have to say āit starts in three hoursā instead of being able to list a specific time.
The fact that it didnāt map up to normal minutes & hours was kind of an advantage because it helped disambiguate those time stamps from normal timestamps.