About WhatTimeWas

A Simple Question That Started Everything

Have you ever seen a timestamp like “10 hours ago” and wondered:

“What exact time was that?”

That simple question was the beginning of WhatTimeWas.

I’m Arslan Saif, a freelance link builder working remotely with different US companies. I also enjoy developing small apps, web applications, and tools for my own workflows.

While working on development projects, I sometimes came across dashboards, activity records, and system alerts that displayed timestamps such as “45 minutes ago” or “6 hours ago.” When reviewing an issue, I needed to know the corresponding clock time without counting backward manually.

I faced the same problem in my remote work. Messages, missed calls, task updates, and shared files were sometimes marked only by how many hours or minutes ago they appeared. When I needed the time for a work record or follow-up, I had to calculate it myself.

My friend Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen experienced the same issue while working with digital content and online communication. Posts, comments, and online updates often appeared with labels such as “hours ago” instead of showing a clear clock time.

When we later met at a coffee shop, we discussed the problem and realized that different parts of our work were leading us to the same question:

“What exact time was that?”

We agreed to create a simple tool that could answer it.

Why We Built WhatTimeWas

Before creating WhatTimeWas, we explored calculators that could convert relative time into a past clock time.

We found that some tools required unnecessary steps, had confusing interfaces, or placed a simple calculation among unrelated features and distractions.

Our idea came from real situations we experienced in development work, remote communication, and digital content. We wanted a focused tool that could solve this everyday problem without adding unnecessary complexity.

That led us to build WhatTimeWas, a straightforward calculator with a clean interface, clear functionality, and one purpose: converting a number of hours and minutes ago into the corresponding past time and date.