About TZ History

Every computer, phone, and server on Earth relies on a small collection of plain-text configuration files to determine what time it is: the IANA Time Zone Database.

Our Mission

The tz database contains fascinating stories of royal decrees, railway schedules, geopolitical shifts, and parliamentary arguments behind every clock change since standard time was invented. Yet nobody has presented it systematically for a general audience.

TZ History provides an open, authoritative, and accessible window into this dataset. Our goals are simple:

Present exact historical facts without editorializing or fluff.
Let the data be the novelty through high-performance animations and charts.
Preserve the maintainers' original notes and attributions as part of the public historical record.

Technical Architecture

Built for speed, reliability, and accessibility:

Frontend: Static Astro build with zero heavy client frameworks. Vanilla TypeScript 2D canvas map rendering in under 8 milliseconds.
Pipeline: Python 3.12 data extraction with RFC 8536 64-bit TZif parsing verified against zdump.
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages with edge caching, security headers, and minimal bundle sizes.