Current
Decimal
Time:

My purpose in creating this web site is to document the various formats of decimal time in use or proposed, not to promote any particular proposal or to introduce a proposal of my own. I do not believe that it is likely or even desirable that decimal time will completely replace conventional clocks and calendars in my lifetime. Such a transition would be too costly and face too much opposition to succeed, as the French found two centuries ago. However, I do think it possible that decimal formats currently in use, such as Julian Dates, might become more commonly used, alongside standard calendars and clocks, much in the same way that UTC (Zulu time) is used alongside local time, or 24-hour (military) time is used alongside AM/PM, and that in the distant future, decimal time might come into everyday use.

I had thought standard dates and times to be irrational, whenever I would accidently read "1:50" as being half-past one o'clock, or had to write computer code to compare times and dates. Being a trekkie from a young age, I knew about stardates from Star Trek. I heard about "Julian Dates" in college around 1980, which looked like stardates. Confusingly, I found a completely two different descriptions, one of which described a Julian date as the day of the year, and another which said that Julian Dates were a count of days since the beginning of the Julian Period, and used by astronomers to date star observations.

It occurred to me that the fractional part of Julian Dates was analogous to hours, minutes and seconds, (0.98765 = 9:87:65) and programmed analog and digit decimal clocks on my Atari 800 in BASIC in the early 1980s, and soon learned that I had reinvented the French Revolutionary clock. In 1987 I started dating my daily journals with "stardates", which were Julian Dates with the first three digits truncated, such as 6988.8, simulating 4-digit stardates from the original Star Trek series, unaware of NASA's Truncated Julian Dates. Later the same year, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, using 5-digit stardates which looked much like Modified Julian Dates, such as 47058.7. Over the years, I continued to learn more about Julian Dates.

One day in the late 1990s I found a MJD script, so I decided to add one to my own web site. I started adding to it, and soon started making decimal clocks again. I decided to learn about the various decimal/metric time proposals, and listed them on my web page in order to compare them. It seemed that most other decimal/metric time sites were unaware of each other and focused mostly on the authors' own ideas, which were usually much the same. Few of them seemed to be talking to each other, so I decided it would be a good idea to provide a community forum for decimal time enthusiasts.

Although I have made a few modest proposals, such as the term "Decimal Universal Time" (UTD) and including fractional days in the ISO 8601 standard, I have not offered any comprehensive proposals of my own, but instead have compared all the existing ones for the best ideas, and have concluded that the best course is to support forms of decimal time which have already been in use, such as French decimal time, Swatch beats, Julian Dates, etc. The world is not ready for anything truly novel, and use of these formats can be expanded gradually with little resistance, until they become better known and accepted. It will be a long time, if ever, before 12-hour and 24-hour time are replaced by decimal time, and I do not consider it vital that this happens, although it would be cool if it did.