Time zone

A time zone is a region that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time.

Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by a whole number of hours (UTC−12 to UTC+14), but a few are offset by 30 or 45 minutes (for example Newfoundland Standard Time is UTC−03:30, Nepal Standard Time is UTC+05:45, and Indian Standard Time is UTC+05:30). Some higher latitude countries use daylight saving time for part of the year, typically by changing clocks by an hour. Many land time zones are skewed toward the west of the corresponding nautical time zones. This also creates a permanent daylight saving time effect.

History

Early timekeeping

Before clocks were first invented, it was common practice to mark the time of day with apparent solar time (also called "true" solar time) – for example, the time on a sundial – which was typically different for every settlement.

Time zone (disambiguation)

A time zone is a region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time.

Time zone can also refer to:

Time zones can also refer to:

Time Zone (video game)

Time Zone is a multi-disk graphical adventure game written and directed by Roberta Williams for the Apple II. Developed in 1981 and released in 1982 by On-Line Systems (later Sierra Entertainment), the game was shipped with six double-sided floppy disks and contained 1,500 areas (screens) to explore along with 39 scenarios to solve. Produced at a time when most games rarely took up more than one side of a floppy, Time Zone is one of the very first games of this magnitude ever released for home computer systems.

Gameplay

Time Zone allows players to travel through time and across the globe solving puzzles while meeting famous historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. The game has static pictures and a text parser that understands two-word commands.

Development

The game used the company's existing Hi-Res Adventure engine. Roberta Williams was the designer and writer, a process that took six months, and about ten other people—the first example of the modern video game-development model in which programmers, artists, and designers are separate people in a team larger than a few people—worked on the game for a year. Each of the more than 1,300 locations had its own artwork. The company hoped to release Time Zone before Christmas 1981, but did not do so until March 1982.