You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.
Yes, people make up silly things for silly reasons all the time.
All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.
The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3
Basically, day (from sunrise to sunset) and night (sunset to sunrise) are each divided into 12 equal periods. But night hours and day hours are, of course, not equal to each other and changing throughout the year.
You can make a computer implementation by pulling astronomical sunset/sunrise times for a specific geographical location and then it's a simple arithmetic to convert from modern hours to horae temporales
I used to think the same, as I was fascinated with the Swatch Beat time concept. Until I read this: https://qntm.org/abolish - the brilliant argument against universal time.
Because then you have to add that you mean UTC since the time format looks like local time. With beats it's obvious from the formatting that it's internet time.
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time: