Our predecessors the romans had no units of time more precise than hours. For thousands of years, they split the time between sunrise & sunset into 12 hours which changed duration based on the seasons. Most people had access to a sundial. The privileged had access to a water clock, immune to clouds & seasons, but still no more accurate than the nearest hour.

It wasn't for another 1400 years that mechanical clocks 1st appeared, allowing time to be known down to the second. The humble unit of time that the sleep command uses & the top program updates in didn't exist until the 1400's.

They could probably measure relative, short durations very accurately, but didn't have units shorter than hours or a number system to represent fractions of hours. The idea of ever needing to measure a time duration shorter than an hour must have been sorcery.

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