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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.

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Yeah, that was the idea, they invented it to make things easier for people around the world communicating over the Internet. They even launched a series of watches which displayed Swatch time. It was so cool, too bad it never took off :(

It was only Phantasy Star Online that used Beats.

It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient.

The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.

Or, more closely, Julian day number.

Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.

I don't see what makes the second less tied to the Earth than the day. The SI system is for scientific purposes, it doesn't have units important for civil purposes like liters. If you were to completely redefine civil timekeeping (good luck!), the day feels like a better unit to focus on.

Wow, it used decimal time? That was always a bad idea - being indivisible by multiples of 3.

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