TermiSoc Time

From TermiSoc: A WikiHistory

TermiSoc Time is similar to Internet Time, with two differences:

- Days are divided into 1024 equal parts (called 'bytes'), not 1000 'beats'.

- 000 is equal to midnight UTC, not midnight in Biel (near Zurich).

A day is defined as 86400 SI seconds; therefore, one unit ('byte') in TermiSoc Time is equal to 84.375 seconds.

TermiSoc Time was devised by Ben A'Lee and Rich Jeffery at 3am one night when they were discussing computer representations of time. They concluded that Swatch's internet time runs through a unknown time zone; and also that internet time should be measured in 1024 pieces, not 1000 (due to computing making 1024 bytes in a Kilobyte, etc.).

The correct prefix to the time is Tt (it was originally destined to be ?, "U+0167 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH STROKE", but computers without Unicode support will not read it correctly). The time should either be displayed as an integer or to three decimal places.

Constraints of TermiSoc Time

The current issue with TermiSoc Time is the 4th digit (ie: the 1) is only used for 24 bytes of the day, thus being redundant for the greater majority. There are future plans to reimplement it into a more appropriate base (8 or 16, most likely). This is to be discussed further and will probably be implemented in 2006.

Implementations

In PHP:

<?php
    function termitime(){
        /* Find the number of seconds since midnight GMT */
        $seconds = (gmdate("G") * 3600) + (gmdate("i") * 60) + gmdate("s");
        /* Then divide it by 84.375, the number of seconds in a byte. */
        $bytes = $seconds/84.375;
        return $bytes;
    }
?>

In Perl:

sub termitime(){
    my @time = gmtime();
    my $seconds = ($time[2] * 3600) + ($time[1] * 60) + $time[0];
    my $bytes = $seconds/84.375;
    return $seconds;
}

In C/C++:

#include <time.h> /* Or <ctime> in C++ */

float termitime(void){
    struct tm timestruct;
    time_t timestamp;
    timestamp = time(0);
    gmtime_r(&timestamp,&timestruct);
   
    int seconds = tmstruct.tm_sec;
    seconds += (tmstruct.tm_min * 60);
    seconds += (tmstruct.tm_hour * 3600);
    float bytes = seconds/84.375; 
    return(bytes);
}