Binary Clock
Time for those who think in bits
How to read it
Point at a step, or tap it, to light up that part of the clock.
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Each column is one digit: red for the hours, yellow for the minutes.
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Each dot is a bit: the bottom one is worth 1, then 2, 4 and 8.
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Add the lit dots in a column to get its digit.
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In the app, two extra green columns show the seconds (not in the widget).
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The story
Binary desk clocks became a geek icon in the early 2000s, glowing on the desks of programmers everywhere. This one uses BCD: each digit of HH:MM gets its own column of bits.
- Year
- c. 2000
- Place
- United States
- Creator
- Geek culture
Fun fact
True binary purists read HHMM as one long binary number; BCD won because humans read digits, not words of bits.
