Swatch Internet Time (1998)
This wasn&#x27;t the first time someone tried to make something better than time zones and our silly days-weeks-months-years system, and I doubt it will be the last. It probably goes back much further, but I know that the French tried to decimalize time in the revolution when they were rationalizing all the other measurements. (see <i>The Measure of All Things</i> by Ken Alder, without question the finest nonfiction book Ive ever read.)<p>The reason I think it doesn&#x27;t catch on is that what we have really isn&#x27;t too bad. If I&#x27;m thinking locally, everything works perfectly. If I&#x27;m trying to schedule a meeting with my colleagues in Singapore, I just remember a single number, 14 and apply it to my time. I know that right this minute, it&#x27;s 21:40 in Singapore, and I know that the sun is down, everyone is home and preparing to go to bed. With UTC, I have to remember that the sun rises at 23:00UTC, do a little math, figure people show up in the office around three hours after the sunrise, etc. Toss in offices in London, Shanghai, Cape Town, Melbourne, etc. and it gets confusing.<p>Modulo 24 math is simple enough that anyone can do it, and looking up the offset for a city is much easier than finding out a &quot;normal&quot; person&#x27;s schedule in that city.<p>Yes of course it gets a little silly with edge cases around DST and strange places (good trivia question: with what city does the South Pole share its time zone? A: Auckland, NZ, where the logistics are handled or anywhere in NZ really), but it works 99% of the time.<p>Could we make it work if we just decided to? Of course! Implementing the metric system was much harder, and we did that (well, most of us did, of course) because there were huge benefits to being on the same measure. Are there equally huge benefits to being on the same time zone? I doubt it.