Thought of this in the shower this morning, if anyone has an answer I’d be very interested!
Unix time is base 10 and I’d say it is pretty widely used. Not for wristwatches but by all kinds of software on the device you’re using to read this right now.
Unix time is just the number of seconds since January 1 1970, isn’t it? How is that base 10, or any other base? If anything, you might argue it’s base 2, since computers generally store integers in binary, but the definition is base-independent afaik.
Yeah, it’s definitely base independent. It’s just that representations of it are typically in base 10 because we as humans typically use base 10, so we show it as such to read it.
Base 10 is not how it is “widely used” though. It is widely used in encoded form. It’s not typically shown as a number when displayed for humans.
The short answer to why we use it is that we inherited it - base 12 of hours/months from the Egyptians and base 60 of second and minutes from Mesopotamians (who got it from the Sumerians).
Egyptians used base 12 a lot for a similar reason that we use base 10 a lot. We use 10 because we have ten fingers, and they used 12 because one hand has 12 knuckles (they’d count on one hand). But it was handy because there are 12 lunar cycles, so it helped keep things more consistent.
Base 60 is also handy because 60 is first number divisible by the first six counting numbers and by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. If you use 60, you have options! Note that we also use 60 for angles and dividing up the globe.
Knuckles turning out to be useful for base 12 doesn’t make them the source / reason for establishing base 12.
I find it far more likely that Egyptian academics decided on base 12 because of its useful calculus properties rather than their knuckles.
The French tried.
