This time format was proposed by the Swedish-American engineer John W. Nystrom in 1863 as part of his tonal system.1
In 1997, the American Mark Vincent Rogers of Intuitor proposed a similar system of hexadecimal time and implemented it in JavaScript as the Hexclock.2
A day is unity, or 1, and any fraction thereof can be shown with digits to the right of the hexadecimal separator. So the day begins at midnight with .0000 and one hexadecimal second after midnight is .0001. Noon is .8000 (one half), one hexadecimal second before was .7FFF and one hexadecimal second before next midnight will be .FFFF.
Intuitor-hextime may also be formatted with an underscore separating hexadecimal hours, minutes and seconds. For example:
Nystrom, John William (1862). Project of a New System of Arithmetic, Weight, Measure and Coins: Proposed to be Called the Tonal System, with Sixteen to the Base. Lippincott. p. 105. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_aNYGAAAAYAAJ ↩
"Intuitor Hex Headquarters, The Hex Clock". www.intuitor.com. Retrieved 2020-04-02. http://www.intuitor.com/hex/hexclock.html ↩