Until the end of time
Remember “GeT“? At the beginning of 2000 it was being touted as Tony Blair’s big idea for e-commerce. As he put it on the scheme’s (now defunct) website at get-time.org:
I am delighted to announce today that UK industry has taken the lead in building a key component of the emerging global electronic marketplace: Greenwich Electronic Time – the global time standard for e-commerce. The GeT website and software will turn GMT into a user friendly e-commerce tool. Because of the Greenwich connection, it will be clearly branded as a UK service to global business, underlining the leading role UK companies are playing in the online marketplace.
The pitch for new world-wide timezones goes like this: “Co-ordinating
network-based events is hard. If an online discussion takes place between
participants in different continents there’s no concept of what would be
considered ‘local time’, and it’s really messy and difficult working out
timezone offsets. What would really simplify things (wait for it…) is if we used a completely different clock.”
At least that’s the explanation given for schemes such as Swatch .beats (a novelty which may still live on in a few online gaming groups, but I’ve rarely seen in the wild) and the optimistic New Earth Time.
Of course, the usual response to this is “hold on, there are plenty of organisations that have been working with international timezones for a while now.” The military, for example, have been using UTC, or ”Zulu” as it’s often known. I like Zulu as a term for UTC. Not only were those guys in the movie “Zulu” super-badasses, but it’s always cool to drop military slang into everyday conversation. I’ve often thought that the metric system might stand a chance in the US if people habitually referred to distance in “klicks” (km).
So promoting UTC for wider internet and business use seemed like a sensible idea. And, in fact, that was at the core of “GeT”. It’s just that they
couldn’t call it UTC. You’re not taking the lead if you’re just promoting something that’s already been in use for years. So UTC needed to be re-branded, maybe with one of those oh-so-trendy-in-the-mid-90s “e” prefixes…
GMT and UTC are usually be thought of as the same thing. Since the late 19C, Greenwich Mean Time was the universal world time base, and (as it hosted the meridian line) was also the local time zone for the UK. However since UTC is calculated using atomic clocks rather than GMT’s solar method, their values actually differ slightly. However, the “GMT” that we use today, is actually UTC.
When naming a universal trans-geographic time reference standard should
probably avoid having the name of a specific location. Something the namers of UTC specifically set out to do. But in the switch from GMT to the
neutrally named UTC, it might have felt like Britain lost out. That one of its
few victories in international standardisation had been devalued – the reminder that the prime meridian runs through London rather than Paris.
GeT was an unashamed attempt to internationally re-establish the Greenwich name as a UK promotional tool. They might as well have called it “CBT: Cool Britannia Time”.
It wasn’t about establishing a new legal time for the UK (such as removing
BST) or even updating legislation, as attempted by the failed Co-ordinated Universal Time Bill which sought to change the legal time base from GMT. It was just about renaming UTC.
And so what was needed was the magic dotcom pixie dust, the other essential element of turn-of-the-century press release – “software”. This, it would emerge, would consist of a website with a Java
applet that would update the local clock against an acurate time-source.
“Why not use NTP?” asked, well, almost everyone.
LINX managed to slightly spoil the GeT announcement by (coincidence? mis-communication?) issuing an earlier press release announcing Greenwich Network Time. This scheme seemed to consist of installing new Datum NTP servers at several London sites and (because “back-room” stuff always fails to excite journos) a Java-based web clock applet would be provided by Enron. Yes. A java-applet that would show you the correct time in a browser window. From Enron. In Java. Stop the press.
One month later, and GNP was a memory. LINX was on board the GeT bus.
Looking at the minutes of the GeT technical meetings it seems that, despite implying that this was some exciting new technology (and not mentioning NTP) that could overcome the existing software limitations holding back international e-commerce, the system was actually built on good-ol’ NTP all along.
While NTP was well known on Unix systems at the time, I’m not sure if it
was known in the Windows world. SNTP support was available in Windows 2000 (at least), but it wasn’t signposted in the native “Date/Time Preferences” utility until XP. The one thing it doesn’t offer (without a registry hack) is the ability to synchronise more than once a week (I imagine to protect those dial-on-demand users whose metered lines would be kept open. Ironic really, since the only time I’ve configured NTP under Windows was specifically to keep a network connection from closing.) Back in 1999, I believe the NetTime application was available, as well as several commercial and shareware alternatives. I wasn’t using them, so I couldn’t say if they were found lacking.
So perhaps there really was a need for a simple, Windows-based, desktop
time sychronisation app.
But, given it was NTP based, a Java applet was a really bad choice. You’d
be limited to only synchronising with an NTP server running on the same address as the webserver hosting the applet. And it turned out, that wasn’t the biggest problem using Java under Internet Explorer – the security model wouldn’t allow the applet to update the system clock.
All that remains of GeT today, appears to be an unmaintained DNS directory of public NTP servers. A TCP query of gb.public.ntp.get-time.net. (the root record of which apparently last edited almost a year ago) lists 23 NTP servers, of which 14 are still responding. This part of the scheme might actually have been useful had it been widely known about. (A couple of years later a similar round-robin DNS idea took off, now available via pool.ntp.org.)
We still have the UTC we had before, we’ve still got the NTP we had (although with wider client support). GeT is just another ghost-site in the
web archive. A branding exercise, all style and little substance. Something
that people might consider emblematic of the Blair government, of New Labour. But I think of it as the essence of what we used to consider the “new Net”. The marketeers pimping the possibilities of the newer than new, but never around to see in that future themselves. While the old net seems to stumble on as before. A rate of progress that seems to illustrate one of Zeno’s paradoxes.
On the internet, the most curmudgeonly survives. And apparently I’ve reached an age where that’s reassuring rather than disappointing.
