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MEMORIES:
Luis_Zoom remembers...When I got my first digital watch I felt like I was from the future! It was one where you ... More »
Posted on 01/18/10
PHOTOS:
The digital watch was perhaps the first significant fashion accessory to really reflect the age of computing. Even as late as1983 when the movie Wargames came out, computers still seemed new and cool and somewhat mysterious. But there was one popular product of the digital age that anyone could sport: the digital watch.
In some ways it improved upon the old, dial variety. Counting seconds was a breeze, and there was no longer any question of “is that hand closer to the 4 or the 5?” No more “quarter past” or “around 3:30” – you could, and did, tell inquiring minds exactly what time it was. To the second. People everywhere were annoying each other with “It’s 12:17 and 43 seconds… no, 44… 45…”
The digital watch first appeared in 1972. HMW’s pulsar – a bargain at $1200! - used LED technology (light-emitting diodes), famous for those iconic red digits that lit up only when you pressed a button. It was just about as simple on the face of it (no pun intended) as could be. Billed as “The Time Computer… First completely new way to tell time in 500 years,” the pulsar led quickly to more affordable versions and then, after a couple of year, to much cheaper wristwatches that used LCD technology instead of LED. In fact, a watch with a liquid crystal display was the first watch ever offered for under $20.
LCDs, in addition to being cheap to produce, offered big improvements over the LED. They used less power and were easier to read. Most important, you didn’t have to use the two-handed arm-cross to tell the time. No more pressing buttons – LCD displays were continuous.
Naturally, as LCD watches grew more popular they gained features. An alarm. A stopwatch. A light, so you could see the time in the dark. And how cool was it to have all this technology in a little disc on your wrist? How far behind could the Dick Tracy wrist communicator be? Well, that didn’t happen as hoped… but the next step was almost as cool: incorporating a calculator into your little LCD device. Geeks everywhere rejoiced as math class became that much less painful – at least, until the teachers caught on.
Later all kinds of other technology got crammed into digital watches: video games, storage for phone numbers and messages, blue “Indiglo” lights. Watches with hands never completely disappeared, and they resurged in popularity. But the digital watch had made a permanent mark on the culture of tech wizardry and science. Never again would technology be a distant mystery. Here it was, on a plain metal band around our wrists.
