Orbeat is an octal time system. It gets its name from a combination of octal, orbit, and beat. This naming reflects the system's structure, which utilizes an octal (base-8) representation to measure time in a continuous, orbit-like cycle.
Loosely inspired by Swatch Internet Time (.beat time), a decimal time system introduced in 1998 used on ICQ and in the game Phantasy Star Online to facilitate cross-continent gaming. It also draws inspiration from batch codes used in retail and manufacturing industries for date codes and competitive intelligence.
I created this project out of intellectual curiosity and as a practical tool. It was a stimulating exercise that allowed me to combine various concepts across multiple disciplines. I needed an efficient and cryptic timestamping method, like batch codes, to manage public-facing personal documents. I sought to devise an innovative way to balance precision with obscurity by crafting a compact yet noteworthy date time code, which would be meaningful to me while remaining ambiguous for others.
My design decisions include:
- Using little-endian ordering, which is more common in modern computing systems
- Adopting a base-8 (octal) number system to avoid rounding issues common in decimal systems
- Flooring the total days before calculating years to ensure accurate year representation
- Full-year was omitted in favor of brevity and due to space constraints
- Including a single fractional year digit to provide a month-like division of the year
- Avoiding timezones to simplify global time representation
- Using the Unix epoch for convenience and to avoid leap-second complications
- The precision is ~21 seconds roughly in the scale of seconds
- Used 365.24219 days per year, which is the mean tropical year, to minimize long-term drift
A concatenated string consisting of:
- Days since Unix epoch formatted with specific digit counts and then reversed
- Years since Unix epoch formatted with specific digit counts and then reversed
The encoding process involves the following steps:
- Calculate the Unix timestamp in milliseconds
- Convert the milliseconds to fractional days since the Unix epoch
- Floor the total days and then convert the milliseconds to fractional years since the Unix epoch
- Transform both days to octal format, preserving the fractional parts
- Transform both years to octal format, preserving the fractional parts
- Format each part (days and years) with specific digit counts for whole and fractional parts
- Combine the formatted years and days
- Reverse the concatenated string to generate the Orbeat time
The encoding process:
- Input:
- Unix timestamp in milliseconds (e.g.,
1700000000000)
- Unix timestamp in milliseconds (e.g.,
- Conversion:
- Days:
1700000000000 / 86400000≈19675.9259259days - Years:
Math.floor(19675.9259259) / 365.24219≈53.86836608333775years
- Days:
- Octal Formatting:
- Days:
19675.9259259→ octal ≈46333.7320457 - Years:
53.86836608333775→ octal ≈65.674464752616
- Days:
- Formatting with Digit Counts:
- Days:
46333.7320457→33(whole) +7320(fraction) →337320 - Years:
65.674464752616→5(whole) +6(fraction) →56
- Days:
- Concatenation and Reversal:
- Combined: Years + Days →
56337320 - Reversed:
02373365
- Combined: Years + Days →
- Output:
02373365