On October 23, 1998, at a ceremony called the Junior Summit ’98, a Swiss watch executive and the then-director of the MIT Media Lab stood together and announced that time zones were unnecessary. The proposal was called Swatch Internet Time. It replaced hours, minutes, and seconds with 1,000 units known as “.beats,” erased every local time on the planet, and asked the internet to synchronize to a single clock ticking in Biel, Switzerland. For a few years it actually appeared on real products: a CNN.com clock, an Ericsson phone menu, a Dreamcast game’s server scheduler. Then it faded from daily use almost as fast as it had arrived, while still, technically, running live on Swatch’s own website more than 25 years later.
How .beat Time Worked
Swatch Internet Time divides the mean solar day into 1,000 equal parts. Each .beat lasts 86.4 seconds, or 1 minute and 26.4 seconds in conventional units. Midnight is @000, noon is @500, and the counter resets at @999. There are no hours or minutes inside the system at all, only a three-digit number preceded by an @ symbol. A moment written @248 means 248 .beats have passed since midnight, or roughly 5 hours and 57 minutes into the day.
The unit itself was not new. It is mathematically identical to the decimal minute from the French decimal calendar of the 1790s. Swatch’s engineers effectively repackaged an 18th century idea and gave it an internet-era name and a satellite marketing budget.
Biel Mean Time: One Clock for the Whole Planet
The entire concept depended on abolishing time zones, and Swatch replaced them with a single global reference called Biel Mean Time, or BMT, named for the town where the company is headquartered. Despite the name, BMT is not actual solar time measured at the Biel meridian. It is simply Central European Time relabeled, fixed at UTC+1 year round. Unlike most countries at that offset, it never shifts for daylight saving.
The pitch was straightforward: a gamer in Tokyo and a trader in Chicago could agree to meet at @500 without either of them converting time zones. On paper this solved a real coordination problem. In practice it asked hundreds of millions of people to abandon a system tied to their own sunrise and sunset in exchange for a number that carried no relationship to daylight where they actually lived.
The Launch and Its Odd Endorsement
The announcement ceremony was 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 same summit, Swatch Internet Time briefly became the official clock of Nation.1, a symbolic online country created and run by children as part of the conference’s programming. That endorsement was largely ceremonial and never translated into any lasting institutional adoption outside the room it happened in.
Who Actually Used It
A handful of real implementations kept the system alive for a few years after launch.
| Adopter | Year | How It Was Used |
|---|---|---|
| CNN.com | 1999 | Displayed .beat time alongside a standard clock on the homepage |
| ICQ | 1999 to early 2000s | Optional .beat display next to local time in the messenger client |
| Phantasy Star Online (Dreamcast) | 2000 | Used .beats to schedule servers across Japanese, American, and European players |
| Ericsson T20e | March 2001 | Mobile phone with a menu option to display Internet Time |
| PHP | Ongoing | The idate() function still ships with a ‘B’ format specifier for .beats |
Outside these examples, adoption never crossed into the mainstream. Programmers already had a simpler tool for cross-region coordination sitting in front of them: Unix time counted seconds from a single fixed epoch without forcing anyone to relearn how a day was structured.
Decimal Time’s Second Failed Attempt
Swatch’s system was not the first attempt to force the clock into base-10 units. Revolutionary France had already run the experiment two centuries earlier, and the outcomes line up closely enough to be worth comparing directly.
| Feature | French Decimal Time (1793) | Swatch Internet Time (1998) |
|---|---|---|
| Day divided into | 10 decimal hours of 100 decimal minutes | 1,000 .beats |
| Backed by | Government decree | Corporate marketing campaign |
| Time zones | Abolished within France | Abolished globally, in theory |
| Lifespan of mandatory use | About 17 months | No mandatory phase; niche use for roughly 3 years |
| Reason cited for failure | Public resistance, cost of replacing clocks | No institutional backing, no daily-life advantage |
Both systems solved a problem that mattered mostly to administrators and engineers, not to the people who were expected to use them every day.
The Beatnik Satellite Fiasco
In early 1999, Swatch tried to back the concept with real infrastructure: a satellite named Beatnik, meant to broadcast a promotional signal supporting the new Beat watches. The plan called for using an amateur radio frequency, a band protected by international treaty for non-commercial use. Radio operators objected immediately, and the backlash was loud enough that the BBC ran a piece calling it an early case of space piracy. Swatch backed down, donated the satellite’s transmitter batteries to the Mir space station instead, and the broadcast never happened. The episode became a bigger news story than the time system itself and signaled how much resistance the whole project was drawing from technical communities who were supposed to be its natural allies.
Why It Failed
Three problems compounded each other. First, .beat time solved a coordination issue that already had a cheaper fix in place, since global systems like GMT and UTC gave the internet a shared reference point without demanding a new counting system. Second, human daily rhythm stays tied to daylight in a way arithmetic can’t override, so a figure like @742 never carried the felt meaning of morning, lunch, or evening.
Third, no government, standards body, or major platform ever required BMT the way railroads once forced standardized time zones onto entire countries to solve a genuine operational crisis. Swatch had a marketing budget instead of a mandate, and once the Beat watch line stopped being commercially interesting, the promotional push behind Internet Time stopped with it.
Decimal time has failed twice in two centuries, once by revolutionary decree and once by marketing budget, because both attempts tried to override solar rhythm with arithmetic convenience. worldtimedata
What Happened to It Since
Swatch never formally retired the format. The original conversion display still runs on the company’s corporate website, and in July 2016 Swatch released the Touch Zero Two, a connected watch that quietly includes a Swatch Internet Time function as a legacy feature alongside standard time.
There is also a lesser known origin twist. A few months before Swatch’s October 1998 announcement, Charly Alberti, drummer of the Argentine rock band Soda Stereo, had already floated a nearly identical concept under the name Internet Hour, complete with his own website tracking it. Whether Swatch’s team knew about Alberti’s version or arrived at the same beat-based idea independently has never been definitively settled. It means the most famous attempt to reinvent the clock for the internet age may not have originated in a Swiss boardroom at all, but in a recording studio in Buenos Aires.
