I bought one of these at a flea market last summer. I saw the box first and I opened it and was shocked by what I saw. I had never heard or seen these before. I asked the women what she wanted for it and she said $30. I had no clue what it was worth and asked her if she'd take $20 since there was no battery hence no way to know if it even worked. She agreed and I got a beautiful late 70's watch. I seriously didn't think it was worth $1000 and when I found out I was so shocked. I haven't sold it though. It's too cool.
@@Rob... where can i find this 20 dollar version you speak of?
8 лет назад+373
_"...but notice on the right hand side there is a dot, that means it's the 21st century..."_ So they were ready for the Y2K bugs even as soon as 1977. Impressive.
@@TahngarthorI recently noticed this bug on my own HP-01 and decided to read through the watch's microcode in the patent to figure out why. The issue is that any date entered on the HP-01 is always initially interpreted as a 1900's date. When the 21st century button is pressed, it just adds 100 years to whatever 1900's value is in the active register. The year 2000 is a leap year, 1900 is not. So Feb 29th 00' gets rolled over to March 1st during date entry, before having 100 years added during conversion, so the result is 1st March 2000. The workaround is to just enter Feb 28th 2000, and then manually add one day, which shows up correctly.
detaart hp sometimes makes some really cool things with tech that fly under the radar. Like their HP 50g calculator, it's very efficient and powerful but it sadly doesn't hold the same place in society like the TI calculators
Your video immediately made me think of a quote from the 1978 BBC Radio 4 series by Douglas Adams (later the book), "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" - “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
The HP standard calculation system + this watch, will never, ever be seen again. Fantastic! Great video. Not only that, the keyboard has the look and feel of old engineering and financial HP calculators.
I actually think the button presses make a lot of sense. the triangle is a Greek Delta, referring to "change". Delta is used in science a lot to mean "a change in this variable". So, if you punch in a number, then hit delta and a variable, you are saying, "Change the value of this variable to this value". It's really a genius design. Those time calculations are fascinating! Very cool.
The triangle is the math symbol "delta" which means the "change" in an equation. It would be used to show how a "change" (triangle) in X would effect Y for example. I think that is what they meant it to say, as the delta symbol is used to change the process on the watch.
Great video! I was also obsessed with digital watches in the 1980s and 90s. I was also surprised when the databank watches came out and then progress just stalled. I always wanted a watch with a full dot-matrix LCD display that could do a lot of functions and those really never materialized. The ones that did are MUCH too large to fit my wrist. I was hopeful when Apple announced a new watch, but those turned out to be too large as well, and much too expensive. In my line of work, they always end up scratched to pieces so I can't imagine wearing a watch that costs more than $100.
I was also obsessed with digital watches in the 80s/90s. Now I use one of these Garmin running watches. In the early 90s a cousin who was an engineer worked with an early GPS receiver. Huge und expensive. I could not imagine this in a wristwatch. But now we can have it. For my sport (marathons etc.) these features are actually usefull while those calculators/databanks/radios/whatever in the 80s were impressive but mostly useless.
Kurt Angerdinger GPS in running watches is used to measure speed, distance and altitude not for navigation. Also most can store data for further analysis later.
I know the Project Engineer for the Hewlett Packard HP-01. His Name was Andre Marion and Steve Wozniak was on his team at one time. Andre Marion started a company called Applied Biosystems were I worked with him. He once showed me this watch and some prototype material. A very good guy and absolutely brilliant.......
Joy of Lego Wow! I realize he must be in his 80s now, and he has been managing a multi million dollar company, so designing this watch is probably a distant memory for him, but is there any chance you could get him to show his prototype on video? Perhaps some kind of collaboration with Techmoan, maybe he could do an interview via Skype? Since he has been managing people for many years besides being an engineer, he will probably make for a very interesting interview!
@MichaelKingsfordGray guess you could not handle the question then,just another narcistic prat on youtube,bless you,you have been quite amusing though,for a throw-out from blighty
This is one of those TM videos that I love to come back to from time to time, mostly because it's pretty much what got me into digital watches. Not long after seeing it, I began picking up old Casios and whatnot at estate sales, and now, I've got a pretty sizeable collection which I am quite proud of. Of course, I'd love to get my hands on one of these someday, but I don't think it's in the cards for me anytime soon. Nonetheless, thanks, Matt, for getting me into one of my favorite little niche fascinations.
Techmoan- Just discovered your channel and really like this video. In 1977, I spent the ungodly sum (which I could barely afford) of $800 to buy an HP-65 programmable calculator. I learned to program on that thing which put be in good stead over the years. I was a real calculator nut and moved up top the HP-67 and then ultimately the HP-41C. I even did my 2nd master's thesis on an HP-41 where I simulated in programming, RPN vs. arithmetic entry. I still have a collection of calculators. And I remember well drooling over the HP-01 at the time. Thanks for sharing. Gave me a nice trip down memory lane.
I had the HP-41 in the early 80s and found myself getting every accessory I could get my hands on, including all the plug in modules and even the magnetic strip reader/writer (though not the tape drive, which I really wanted to get my hands on). Unfortunately I made the mistake of giving the entire kit to one of my cousins when she started college when I upgraded to the HP 48SX and I know damn well she sold it, she still won't admit to it 30 years later XD. Also, I had piping hot lust for the HP71...
me too. I had the mag tape reader/writer, the optical wand, the data casstte drive, a bunch of modules. I sold most of that stuff about 10 years ago on ebay. Still have the original HP-41C though. What a great machine. Also, I know use a HP41 program on my home and work laptops. Still using RPN!
This channel is so interesting as someone who was born in ‘71 and was into computers and electronics since I was a kid. I love hearing the history of all this stuff. These videos are so well done! Subscribed!
So very glad I found this channel. This is content I can binge to. I got to the end of this video and realized not only had I not hardly blinked, but I also had a bit of drool coming out over this watch.
Man, that watch can do live calculations that my phone needs wolfram alpha and an internet connection to do. I wonder if anyone's made a stand alone app that works like that.
Alexander Roderick you'd think that easy calculation like this would be available in our huge processors.. but I think the problem is that the demand is low
Yeah, it simply takes time to code in and the demand is too low for some software guru to take the time to do it. That watch was purpose-built to do such things, hence why it can do it. Modern smartphones / smartwatches can do just as well if someone codes it for them, and could probably achieve much better total accuracy with the access to atomic clocks through the Internet!
Kurt Angerdinger Maybe they need access to your contacts in order to flash the light when you get a call or from a specific person. In addition, many smartwatches can retain most of their functions even if they're not paired with a phone. Problem is, they're either very expensive, like the Gear S3 Frontier, or they're China crap.
+Alexander Roderick | If you have Android, then the F-Droid store of free and open-source (FOSS) Android software has some interesting apps you could try out. One scientific calculator app is Arity, which shows live totals, but I don't know if it does time-based calculations. There's also the Units app, which is a units converter and calculator, and this one does time-based calculations. To others: If your Android phone is relatively basic, and does not have a built-in flashlight, then the F-Droid store offers many small-sized flashlight apps that do not require access to contacts. This does require (temporarily) enabling third-party installs, but the open-source flashlight apps' much smaller size removes the requirement for Play Store-based apps that want access to data that they should have no right to have access to. In some cases, a phone may have a built-in flashlight, but no OS-level functionality to turn it on. This applies to older versions of Android, which I've seen with Android 4.0 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), but may also apply to any Android 4.x version. That's why an app is still required. Some flashlight apps available on F-Droid do require camera access to control the hardware flashlight. In the F-Droid store app, search using the 'flash' and 'torch' terms, which will match anything that contains these patterns. I've chosen MrWhite, which is only 21 KiB in size. Depending on version, Samsung smartphones' TouchWiz UI allows adding an "Assistive Light" widget for phones that have a built-in hardware flashlight. Android-native flashlight functionality is accessible via Google Now in Android 5.0 Lollipop. I don't know, if the function is accessible by other means. Android 6.0 and 7.0 should have the flashlight functionality built-in - check the expanded notification area.
what an absolute ripper! Todays tech is amazing but I forget just how exciting this stuff was back in my childhood.Its still a beautiful watch today.Cheers for that
Honestly, having grown up in the mid 2000s, my strongest memories of digital watches was they always seemed to beep in the middle of classes and get on everyone's nerves
What an interesting video! I once had one and was amazed to know that HP knew the longevity of the quality building into it the calendar to 2099. A long time ago I got a CD from HP on how to use it, and one thing that was fun was watching thunderstorms; touch the button with the flash of lightning and again with the thunder and you had distance to where the strike hit. It was dazzling in '77 and still is today!
Great Video. The research you do before starting each review video is amazing. 1:22 I had one of that Casio Touch Sensor Calculator Watch, gifted by a family friend (In fact on my request after seeing its ad in news paper!). It was an amazing watch for that period. Only drawback was it had the key buttons printed on the outside glass surface with a transparent conductive material. The circuit lines from each invisible button pass into the inside electronics after converging at the top of the screen like a PCB. Hence, a single scratch on the glass will cut-off the circuit and the watch function will cease to work for the affected buttons. (Not like today's capacitive tocuh screens, which can work even when the display is broken or shattered). It was a design fault that the glass was not recessed and was at the bezel level, and hence was very easy to get scratched. Casio improved the design in their later models by recessing the glass.
Wow, that's actually really clever. I don't know if it's really useful or just gimmicky, but some of those capabilities are stuff I've never seen any other timekeeping device OR non-Wolfram-Alpha calculator provide. That's genuinely the most impressive watch I've seen. Plus, it looks pretty retro-stylish.
I really enjoyed that! Thank you very much for making this video. I had my first digital watch for Christmas in 1977, it was a simple LCD watch but it was my pride and joy back then. By the late 1980s I'd gone back to mechanical watches and stuck with them until I got myself an Apple Watch last year.
Love your content! My father told me one of his friends got a digital watch in the early 1970s and it cost about $700. I didn’t believe him at the time because you could buy digital watches for about $10 in the 80s. So there you made me believe my dad for once lol
Holy cow! I love watching (pun intended) your trip back through my childhood. I HAD that Casio capacitive touch watch. I was one of the coolest kids in school that year for sure. Thanks for the memories.
If I understood correctly, that watch is actually Y2K aware?! If so, mad props to the HP engineers for thinking that far ahead! Gone are those days where engineers at HP, Bell Labs, etc. actually BUILT stuff. Now it's "Eh, that's good enough to last a year".
To be fair, gone to a large extent are also the days that people were willing to pay for quality. The cheapest version of this watch cost $650 in 1977, which had the same buying power as $2,753 in 2018.
It's more likely that they knew people would be carrying out date calculations that involved the next century for things like long term investments, pension plans, mortgages etc.
Takes me back to when I got a calculator watch back around 2010 from a car boot sale that was also a TV remote. Everyone thought it was the coolest thing around, so clearly there's still a lot of appeal in these old gadget watches.
+Anatolian ✣ Apple watch cannot do things the HP Smartwatch can which is ridicules, to begin with most smartwatches have pathetic battery life some do not even last a day, that is backward, a watch is suppose to have good battery life not the opposite.
Excellent video. I come back to this one now and again because this watch is so fascinating. It has features no one knew they wanted. Features no one asked for. All in a time when this type computation was cutting edge. I'd wear one of these.
Pretty sure that triangle key is actually a delta, as in the greek letter used to denote changes in values in maths, not sure if it works in every case you showed but things like delta or delta makes some level of logical sense that way
It's mind-boggling how quickly technology progressed back then. Going from the first basic digital watch to the first calculator watch within just a few years, for instance. And the 1980s indeed saw the beginning of the popularity of touchscreens (at least as novelty items). As far as I know, the touchscreen interface in my car (1988 Buick Reatta) is the first CRT-touchscreen system in an American automobile, first introduced on the 1986 Buick Riviera. The green-phosphor monochrome CRT-touchscreen is used to control the radio and cassette deck, with graphic equalizer, channel balancer, analog Dolby noise reduction, and station presets, climate control (heat/AC/defrost, temperature, fan speeds, and two climate presets), fuel economy monitor (instantaneous and average) and range calculator, trip computer (showing miles traveled, and remaining miles and ETA to destination + gas consumption), user-programmable reminders, on-board diagnostic readout, showing error codes and live data stream, all-digital gauges with date and time adjustment, digital compass, brightness & tone controls, status screen, and more -- all by touching the screen. This was all accomplished through six different pages, which would be selected by pressing one of the six hard buttons along the periphery of the screen. People I talk to today seem to be unable to conceive that a car could have done all that back in the '80s! It could do most of the things that such systems in cars today can do, and I would say it is also more intuitive and easier to use than the systems in today's cars with the long, complex menus and more finicky touch response. By the way, you forgot to include the pic from the 1983 movie Wargames, where the junior missileer in the beginning missile drill scene visibly wears a calculator watch.
12:22 my jaw dropped on the desk... In late 80's as a child I figured out how to full use a Casio Databank watch only by myself without a manual (all my parents thought I was genius for that) but this was insane. I love it.
This was such an amazing piece of technology, and even by current standards it still is. The fact that you have to learn to use it goes against most of today's UI and UX design, but that's OK since this isn't some throwaway piece of tech. If you get this, you have the certainty that you'll get quite a few years (decades) of use out of it... and also look good doing it.
I find digital watches to be much better and useful than analog watches, in terms of usefulness digital watches win by far, analog watches are good for fashion/jewelry
One of the most entertaining channels on RUclips! My uncle had one of those watches that 007 had (well I am sure it was not the exact one but a knock off). It was so amazing to press the button and the time would appear in the middle of the black screen. We all thought it was some high tech marvel. Now I have a Microsoft Band and it is pretty much the same thing - black screen, press a button. The more things change...
*It was an editing error* Every video starts off with a copy and paste of the last one to retain the up to date patreon list. All audio is deleted apart from the intro and outro music. *1second* of audio from the previous video was not deleted in error.
Wow, this brings back memories. I think it was back in the early 80's I had a silver Casio Databank watch. It had a flat membrane style keyboard below the screen which you could use a finger nail to access. You had the ability to store people's name and numbers, etc in the watch along with the usual compliment of functions like calculator, stopwatch, alarms, etc. It was one of my favorite watches. Apparently SOME of the watches had a slight issue. The first time you went to have the battery replaced the watch would die and that was it. It would never turn on again. I remember I took it in to have the battery replaced where I had purchased it. The person was putting the battery in and as he was finishing up he said, "well, you may be getting a new watch today." I asked why. He said that some of these watches had a defect and after you put in a new battery, that was it, they would never work again. He finished and put the back on mine and turned it over and nothing, it was completely blank. He said yep, this is one of them. I then had to pick out another watch to replace it. Of course they were no longer selling the same exact watch so I had to get something else. I was really depressed since I loved the functionality of that watch.
I mentioned to my Dad how it seemed somewhat silly to have calculators in digital watches, and it turned out he actually used his calculator in the 80s! He used to calculate payment plan estimates for people while working as a Curry's salesman. Probably one of the only people who actually used the function for useful work.
Very eye-opening. I've been using the Casio CA-53W for over a decade, and it served me well all through high school and university (microbiology) whenever something was too time-consuming to do in my head, but didn't demand the functionality of the TI-83 handheld calculator in my backpack. It surprises me that Casio hasn't updated the design in decades, and actually many of these older watches have better functionality -- things like scientific operations and unit conversion. I went to dozens of watch retail stores recently and was dismayed that NONE of them carried a calculator watch. In a parallel universe where this technology had not gotten dropped like it was hot, my dream would be something capable of graphing, entering formulas with variables, and the ability to store and work with lists of numeric values in a way that isn't just a shitty, over-glorified text file like data-bank watches have.
i saw led fail on cb channel transmitter display or frequency display. but tht's due voltage surge, the watch is only connected to the batteries so that won't happen unless you 'r striken by lightning .
I got my first calculator watch in 2009 (when I was 9), and I thought they were really new and advanced. Today I learned the 80s didn't just have such watches already; they even had touchscreens and handwriting recognition as early as then.
On 1977, I was working at a place called Chafitz Equipment Company, the “adult playground”. We sold all the cutting edge electronics, including the HP watch. This video bring back the memories.
I had a cheap-o calculator watch in the early 2000's too. On my birthday my dad had also bought me a watch with a camera! It had really crappy black and white display and you would transfer the files through infrared. Man that was like alien tech to me. Thanks a lot for bringing back memories :-)
Interesting video, thanks for making this. I remember trawling through the Argos catalogue in the 80's, checking out all the features available on 'new' digital watches. I seem to remember some had built in radios & tv, even a few with basic arcade games. It would be fun to collect these.
Yeah I'm a few years late. As a blind kid, my favorite watch was the Radio Shack talking watch. It had a super loud and annoying rooster crowing alarm!
Bacon420 I always remember this old guy use to come into our school to do talks about his blindness I always remember he had this thing that buzzed when it was raining (rain detector) he also had a watch like you said tells you the time best wishes to you brother 😊👍🏻
Loved tech watches of the 80's, and had a calculator watch, temperature, barometric graphing watches, and even surise/sunset watch. Awesome video, of times gone by.
Triangle is actually Delta, which is the symbol for change in mathematics. HP actually recalled the watch and offered a refund because they decided to get out of the watch business and close down the repair center. LCD displays were very unreliable and short-lived at the time; they faded or bled-out. I hope you show a Seiko Receptor sometime.
Beautiful work on another awesome video! and I'm sure someone has said this already, but I'd love to see what you have on your "wish list" of stuff to get a hold of (either due to price or availability).... you've got great taste in retro tech...
I had a large collection of watches when I was a kid. I had radio watch, a couple transformer robot watches, a TV remote watch, a video game watch with a real joystick, some calculator watches but by far my favorite was one of the later iterations of the Casio Databank. It's main feature for me was the addition of scrolling text to allow for longer names in contacts. I used that feature quite frequently to "help" me out on tests. I was able to put math formulas or test answers in there so they would scroll across the screen while I was taking a test. My teachers never suspected anything as I was merely checking to see how much "time" was left to finish the test. 😉
I thought it was a bit funny that the LED display was considered 'outdated', as essentially all modern smartwatches use LEDs (OLEDs) as opposed to backlit LCD. :)
Brilliant video. I had a watch in 1985. It was a Christmas present from my parents. It had calculator stop watch it even held phone numbers. But for me the best feature was what would now I guess be called The Ring tones. It played about 20 different tunes. I really miss that watch.
I had a calc watch that displayed the entire month on it's face and had access to it's entire calendar history back to the 1800's at least. You could scroll at high speed through history. I *loved* it!
0:55 I had THE EXACT GODDAMN MODEL of that watch given to be by one of my uncles as a birthday present when I was 9 or so. I got total 'frisson' when I saw it here. :-) Good ol' Casio. I loved that watch and wore it till the strap crumbled/wore through, and by then my girlfriend (eventual wife) had bought me a nice new (albeit analog) watch, so never was replaced but nice to see again. Like an old friend.
Mine was the much more humble nr.5 at 0:37, a gift from my father. Up to this very day I remember for some reason the salesman/watch repair guy saying "these Casios are very reliable". The years that came after proved him right, but I don't have the watch anymore myself either, even though I don't recall it ever having any malfunction or issue - likely my first mobile made it redundant.
@@AkosJaccik Yeah, mobiles were definately the death-blow for most watches except at the very high end, at least until smart-watches are bringing a slight rennaisance for now. But yes, those old Casio watches, fancy or plain, they just worked. And never stopped working.
@@AkosJaccik Absolutely for truth. I don't think i ever even needed to swap out the battery on that bad boy. It was an amazing watch to be certain. Especially for a guy like me slow on the uptake when it comes to certain calculations. ;-)
As a guy born in 1971 I can honestly say that tech was So much more interesting in the late seventies and early eighties than it is today. Tech was Exploding in a way that we do not see or recognise today. Yes my dad brought home a PET in 1978 and in 1981 we had a pre launch 64. (Dad worked with computers). I Love this stuff. I remember having a calculator watch in 1979 and a watch that someone stole at school in 1980 that had alarm tones set to dates, like Jingle bells at Christmas! And that was way back when!!!
The real HP lives on in "cast offs" like Agilent and Keysight, where thankfully world leading products, innovation and service survive, albeit at a price of course. HP the company today is HP in name only, and is a race to the bottom I'm afraid and has been like that for about 15 years. I'm not an employee or dealer or anything, just someone who knows quality and innovation when I see it, and owns more HP/Agilent/Keysight test equipment than is strictly necessary.
A real treat -- and more to come I hope! Reminded me of the Casio Touch Cal that I bought in the early 80s and scratched the glass within a few hours :( and of the Seiko Databank with detachable NFC-like qwerty keyboard that I got new for £40 and sold recently for nearly £100. I collect LCD and LED watches and have a gold Bulova Computron 'Driver' LED and a Jaeger LeCoultre gold LED which is quite rare in working condition. I still wear my Seiko 5 Series Sports (same as yours) day-to-day. More retro like the HP-01 please!!
Nothing was written down - it's all off the top of my head albeit with multiple takes done to ensure the words fit the video that I've pre-assembled and sometimes I'll re-assemble the video to fit the words. The only parts of the videos that are ever scripted are the muppet outros as I need to keep on top of which character says what in what order and what line they are responding to.
Techmoan Ok wow... I could've sworn it was scripted by the way you talk in your videos and how informative they are with all the pictures of magazines and stuff. Massive respect for you then!
I've been wearing classic Casio watches for a long time now. My dad had them in the 80s when I was a little kid and they seemed so huge on my wrist back then.
Sadly, they transformed from a company who made products for engineers and scientists to a company who makes products for consumers. Presumably because there's more money to be made.
There was another really cool LCD calculator watch made around the same time that had a flip down panel covering the buttons. A friend of mines Dad had one and I remember it looking so cool. Will look for it and will edit if I can find it.
Very enjoyable going through your catalog after having just discovered your brilliant (USA='cool', 'interesting') hobby. Thank you, as well, for the clever music and pop culture references, e.g., "this...watch really does know what time it is", answering the question posed by the group Chicago (Transit Authority) a decade before this watch was made.
I bought one of these at a flea market last summer. I saw the box first and I opened it and was shocked by what I saw. I had never heard or seen these before. I asked the women what she wanted for it and she said $30. I had no clue what it was worth and asked her if she'd take $20 since there was no battery hence no way to know if it even worked. She agreed and I got a beautiful late 70's watch. I seriously didn't think it was worth $1000 and when I found out I was so shocked. I haven't sold it though. It's too cool.
Amazing what you can find at flea markets :)
you can buy them brand new for $20, dont think yours is worth no 1000..lol
@@Rob... You cant buy an HP Calculator watch for $20 You are an idiot.
Take it to Pawn Stars so we can laugh at you when they tell you it’s worth $20 dollars.
@@Rob... where can i find this 20 dollar version you speak of?
_"...but notice on the right hand side there is a dot, that means it's the 21st century..."_
So they were ready for the Y2K bugs even as soon as 1977. Impressive.
There was a small Y2K bug in that it didn't allow you to enter feb 29, 2000 as a date. All the other calculations are still correct, though.
it sounds like the bug is only with entering that date, it still calculates correctly
@@TahngarthorI recently noticed this bug on my own HP-01 and decided to read through the watch's microcode in the patent to figure out why.
The issue is that any date entered on the HP-01 is always initially interpreted as a 1900's date. When the 21st century button is pressed, it just adds 100 years to whatever 1900's value is in the active register.
The year 2000 is a leap year, 1900 is not. So Feb 29th 00' gets rolled over to March 1st during date entry, before having 100 years added during conversion, so the result is 1st March 2000. The workaround is to just enter Feb 28th 2000, and then manually add one day, which shows up correctly.
Those time based calculations are very powerful.
Pretty impressive for it's age.
detaart hp sometimes makes some really cool things with tech that fly under the radar. Like their HP 50g calculator, it's very efficient and powerful but it sadly doesn't hold the same place in society like the TI calculators
Hell yeah!
Only because of the education monopoly on them.
I was disappointed it wasn't RPN. But still very cool.
I don't think so.
This watch was so far ahead of its time. Certainly had far more functions than 80s LCD calculator watches.
Your video immediately made me think of a quote from the 1978 BBC Radio 4 series by Douglas Adams (later the book), "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" - “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
"my left arm's come off, how am I going to operate my digital watch now?"
42...
Stephen St. Romain :)
Stephen St. Romain "Lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
The HP standard calculation system + this watch, will never, ever be seen again. Fantastic! Great video.
Not only that, the keyboard has the look and feel of old engineering and financial HP calculators.
When this came out the standard hp calculator used rpn. Still using mine from the early '80s.
I actually think the button presses make a lot of sense. the triangle is a Greek Delta, referring to "change". Delta is used in science a lot to mean "a change in this variable". So, if you punch in a number, then hit delta and a variable, you are saying, "Change the value of this variable to this value".
It's really a genius design. Those time calculations are fascinating! Very cool.
The triangle is the math symbol "delta" which means the "change" in an equation. It would be used to show how a "change" (triangle) in X would effect Y for example. I think that is what they meant it to say, as the delta symbol is used to change the process on the watch.
Christopher Eves
The triangle is more of a SHIFT for gold symbols above....
I just commented the same thing you said about the triangle being delta thinking I was the first clever clogs to say it lol.
Great video! I was also obsessed with digital watches in the 1980s and 90s. I was also surprised when the databank watches came out and then progress just stalled. I always wanted a watch with a full dot-matrix LCD display that could do a lot of functions and those really never materialized. The ones that did are MUCH too large to fit my wrist. I was hopeful when Apple announced a new watch, but those turned out to be too large as well, and much too expensive. In my line of work, they always end up scratched to pieces so I can't imagine wearing a watch that costs more than $100.
The 8-Bit Guy Hey there! Just a quick question, any news on the keyboard made by Ben Heck? Will he send it to you for a vid?
Sorry, I haven't heard anything from Ben Heck.
The 8-Bit Guy
Oh, ok :( I'm a sad pepe now
I was also obsessed with digital watches in the 80s/90s. Now I use one of these Garmin running watches. In the early 90s a cousin who was an engineer worked with an early GPS receiver. Huge und expensive. I could not imagine this in a wristwatch. But now we can have it. For my sport (marathons etc.) these features are actually usefull while those calculators/databanks/radios/whatever in the 80s were impressive but mostly useless.
Kurt Angerdinger GPS in running watches is used to measure speed, distance and altitude not for navigation. Also most can store data for further analysis later.
Hey, you make really high quality videos. I think this, LGR, and 8-bit Guy are my top tech channels on RUclips.
@Joe Kinchicken at least in your opinion...
I know the Project Engineer for the Hewlett Packard HP-01. His Name was Andre Marion and Steve Wozniak was on his team at one time. Andre Marion started a company called Applied Biosystems were I worked with him. He once showed me this watch and some prototype material. A very good guy and absolutely brilliant.......
Joy of Lego Wow! I realize he must be in his 80s now, and he has been managing a multi million dollar company, so designing this watch is probably a distant memory for him, but is there any chance you could get him to show his prototype on video? Perhaps some kind of collaboration with Techmoan, maybe he could do an interview via Skype? Since he has been managing people for many years besides being an engineer, he will probably make for a very interesting interview!
@MichaelKingsfordGray is this your real name?,there is only your word it is
No,not really,on the basis that it was a question that i asked,nothing else
@MichaelKingsfordGray guess you could not handle the question then,just another narcistic prat on youtube,bless you,you have been quite amusing though,for a throw-out from blighty
This is one of those TM videos that I love to come back to from time to time, mostly because it's pretty much what got me into digital watches. Not long after seeing it, I began picking up old Casios and whatnot at estate sales, and now, I've got a pretty sizeable collection which I am quite proud of. Of course, I'd love to get my hands on one of these someday, but I don't think it's in the cards for me anytime soon. Nonetheless, thanks, Matt, for getting me into one of my favorite little niche fascinations.
Techmoan- Just discovered your channel and really like this video. In 1977, I spent the ungodly sum (which I could barely afford) of $800 to buy an HP-65 programmable calculator. I learned to program on that thing which put be in good stead over the years. I was a real calculator nut and moved up top the HP-67 and then ultimately the HP-41C. I even did my 2nd master's thesis on an HP-41 where I simulated in programming, RPN vs. arithmetic entry. I still have a collection of calculators. And I remember well drooling over the HP-01 at the time. Thanks for sharing. Gave me a nice trip down memory lane.
Interestingly this watch was the first time HP didn't use reverse polish notation on one of their calculators.
i remember thinking that was odd at the time. And as you might know, once you go RPN, you never go back ;)
"Reverse Polish Notation" - not heard that term for nearly 30 years (when I used to program using "Forth" programming language) - made me smile
I had the HP-41 in the early 80s and found myself getting every accessory I could get my hands on, including all the plug in modules and even the magnetic strip reader/writer (though not the tape drive, which I really wanted to get my hands on). Unfortunately I made the mistake of giving the entire kit to one of my cousins when she started college when I upgraded to the HP 48SX and I know damn well she sold it, she still won't admit to it 30 years later XD.
Also, I had piping hot lust for the HP71...
me too. I had the mag tape reader/writer, the optical wand, the data casstte drive, a bunch of modules. I sold most of that stuff about 10 years ago on ebay. Still have the original HP-41C though. What a great machine. Also, I know use a HP41 program on my home and work laptops. Still using RPN!
"That dot means it's in the 21st century" I forget what century I'm in all the time, thank you HP.
No worries. Your current century is: ᛫
and no "millennium bug" either.
"That's some cool retro tech, I would like to purchase that" *Checks ebay* "Casio it is."
I felt same when I looked ebay.
@Dylan your right I rather has the antique calculator watch then the useless smart watch
I simply couldn’t stop watching this. Well done!
Those additional calculator functions are really innovative and a great addition. Very impressed.
This channel is so interesting as someone who was born in ‘71 and was into computers and electronics since I was a kid. I love hearing the history of all this stuff. These videos are so well done! Subscribed!
That wrist strap stylus is nothing short of genius.
So very glad I found this channel. This is content I can binge to. I got to the end of this video and realized not only had I not hardly blinked, but I also had a bit of drool coming out over this watch.
Man, that watch can do live calculations that my phone needs wolfram alpha and an internet connection to do. I wonder if anyone's made a stand alone app that works like that.
Alexander Roderick you'd think that easy calculation like this would be available in our huge processors.. but I think the problem is that the demand is low
Yeah, it simply takes time to code in and the demand is too low for some software guru to take the time to do it. That watch was purpose-built to do such things, hence why it can do it. Modern smartphones / smartwatches can do just as well if someone codes it for them, and could probably achieve much better total accuracy with the access to atomic clocks through the Internet!
Kurt Angerdinger Maybe they need access to your contacts in order to flash the light when you get a call or from a specific person. In addition, many smartwatches can retain most of their functions even if they're not paired with a phone. Problem is, they're either very expensive, like the Gear S3 Frontier, or they're China crap.
Sadly this looks designed by engineers for engineers.
In today's marketing to the masses, this is unthinkable.
+Alexander Roderick | If you have Android, then the F-Droid store of free and open-source (FOSS) Android software has some interesting apps you could try out.
One scientific calculator app is Arity, which shows live totals, but I don't know if it does time-based calculations.
There's also the Units app, which is a units converter and calculator, and this one does time-based calculations.
To others: If your Android phone is relatively basic, and does not have a built-in flashlight, then the F-Droid store offers many small-sized flashlight apps that do not require access to contacts.
This does require (temporarily) enabling third-party installs, but the open-source flashlight apps' much smaller size removes the requirement for Play Store-based apps that want access to data that they should have no right to have access to.
In some cases, a phone may have a built-in flashlight, but no OS-level functionality to turn it on. This applies to older versions of Android, which I've seen with Android 4.0 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), but may also apply to any Android 4.x version. That's why an app is still required. Some flashlight apps available on F-Droid do require camera access to control the hardware flashlight.
In the F-Droid store app, search using the 'flash' and 'torch' terms, which will match anything that contains these patterns. I've chosen MrWhite, which is only 21 KiB in size.
Depending on version, Samsung smartphones' TouchWiz UI allows adding an "Assistive Light" widget for phones that have a built-in hardware flashlight.
Android-native flashlight functionality is accessible via Google Now in Android 5.0 Lollipop. I don't know, if the function is accessible by other means. Android 6.0 and 7.0 should have the flashlight functionality built-in - check the expanded notification area.
what an absolute ripper! Todays tech is amazing but I forget just how exciting this stuff was back in my childhood.Its still a beautiful watch today.Cheers for that
Honestly, having grown up in the mid 2000s, my strongest memories of digital watches was they always seemed to beep in the middle of classes and get on everyone's nerves
I’ve had a couple teachers confiscate them if they heard it
What an interesting video! I once had one and was amazed to know that HP knew the longevity of the quality building into it the calendar to 2099. A long time ago I got a CD from HP on how to use it, and one thing that was fun was watching thunderstorms; touch the button with the flash of lightning and again with the thunder and you had distance to where the strike hit. It was dazzling in '77 and still is today!
The design of the box and the manual is very beautiful, and the watch design is also very beautiful.
Great Video.
The research you do before starting each review video is amazing.
1:22 I had one of that Casio Touch Sensor Calculator Watch, gifted by a family friend (In fact on my request after seeing its ad in news paper!). It was an amazing watch for that period.
Only drawback was it had the key buttons printed on the outside glass surface with a transparent conductive material. The circuit lines from each invisible button pass into the inside electronics after converging at the top of the screen like a PCB. Hence, a single scratch on the glass will cut-off the circuit and the watch function will cease to work for the affected buttons. (Not like today's capacitive tocuh screens, which can work even when the display is broken or shattered).
It was a design fault that the glass was not recessed and was at the bezel level, and hence was very easy to get scratched. Casio improved the design in their later models by recessing the glass.
Wow, that's actually really clever. I don't know if it's really useful or just gimmicky, but some of those capabilities are stuff I've never seen any other timekeeping device OR non-Wolfram-Alpha calculator provide. That's genuinely the most impressive watch I've seen. Plus, it looks pretty retro-stylish.
I really enjoyed that! Thank you very much for making this video. I had my first digital watch for Christmas in 1977, it was a simple LCD watch but it was my pride and joy back then. By the late 1980s I'd gone back to mechanical watches and stuck with them until I got myself an Apple Watch last year.
That James Bond watch is actually pretty sweet looking, even today.
The "triangle" isn't exactly an enter key, and it makes perfect sense once you realize it's delta which stands for "change".
"Well, most people didn't use the calculator that much." It was the 1980s, so undoubtedly, quite a few coke dealers used it a lot.
This is my new favorite channel.
Love your content! My father told me one of his friends got a digital watch in the early 1970s and it cost about $700. I didn’t believe him at the time because you could buy digital watches for about $10 in the 80s. So there you made me believe my dad for once lol
Holy cow! I love watching (pun intended) your trip back through my childhood. I HAD that Casio capacitive touch watch. I was one of the coolest kids in school that year for sure. Thanks for the memories.
If I understood correctly, that watch is actually Y2K aware?! If so, mad props to the HP engineers for thinking that far ahead! Gone are those days where engineers at HP, Bell Labs, etc. actually BUILT stuff. Now it's "Eh, that's good enough to last a year".
Yes it is...21st Century dates are entered with an additional character which is then indicated by the . at the end of the display.
Techmoan what is the song that plays during your skits (with the puppets)?
To be fair, gone to a large extent are also the days that people were willing to pay for quality. The cheapest version of this watch cost $650 in 1977, which had the same buying power as $2,753 in 2018.
It's extremely impressive they anticipated it still working in the 21st Century and having a way to indicate 21st Century dates!
It's more likely that they knew people would be carrying out date calculations that involved the next century for things like long term investments, pension plans, mortgages etc.
Takes me back to when I got a calculator watch back around 2010 from a car boot sale that was also a TV remote. Everyone thought it was the coolest thing around, so clearly there's still a lot of appeal in these old gadget watches.
We come so far in technology we gone fucking backwards
We've gone nowhere so fast we suddenly find ourselves where we started.
+Anatolian ✣
Apple watch cannot do things the HP Smartwatch can which is ridicules, to begin with most smartwatches have pathetic battery life some do not even last a day, that is backward, a watch is suppose to have good battery life not the opposite.
Excellent video. I come back to this one now and again because this watch is so fascinating. It has features no one knew they wanted. Features no one asked for. All in a time when this type computation was cutting edge. I'd wear one of these.
Pretty sure that triangle key is actually a delta, as in the greek letter used to denote changes in values in maths, not sure if it works in every case you showed but things like
delta
or
delta
makes some level of logical sense that way
It's mind-boggling how quickly technology progressed back then. Going from the first basic digital watch to the first calculator watch within just a few years, for instance. And the 1980s indeed saw the beginning of the popularity of touchscreens (at least as novelty items). As far as I know, the touchscreen interface in my car (1988 Buick Reatta) is the first CRT-touchscreen system in an American automobile, first introduced on the 1986 Buick Riviera. The green-phosphor monochrome CRT-touchscreen is used to control the radio and cassette deck, with graphic equalizer, channel balancer, analog Dolby noise reduction, and station presets, climate control (heat/AC/defrost, temperature, fan speeds, and two climate presets), fuel economy monitor (instantaneous and average) and range calculator, trip computer (showing miles traveled, and remaining miles and ETA to destination + gas consumption), user-programmable reminders, on-board diagnostic readout, showing error codes and live data stream, all-digital gauges with date and time adjustment, digital compass, brightness & tone controls, status screen, and more -- all by touching the screen. This was all accomplished through six different pages, which would be selected by pressing one of the six hard buttons along the periphery of the screen. People I talk to today seem to be unable to conceive that a car could have done all that back in the '80s! It could do most of the things that such systems in cars today can do, and I would say it is also more intuitive and easier to use than the systems in today's cars with the long, complex menus and more finicky touch response.
By the way, you forgot to include the pic from the 1983 movie Wargames, where the junior missileer in the beginning missile drill scene visibly wears a calculator watch.
Led display looks gorgeous.
12:22 my jaw dropped on the desk...
In late 80's as a child I figured out how to full use a Casio Databank watch only by myself without a manual (all my parents thought I was genius for that) but this was insane. I love it.
This was such an amazing piece of technology, and even by current standards it still is. The fact that you have to learn to use it goes against most of today's UI and UX design, but that's OK since this isn't some throwaway piece of tech. If you get this, you have the certainty that you'll get quite a few years (decades) of use out of it... and also look good doing it.
One of the best RUclips-channels.
As a kid I found LED watches and calculators amazing, LCD item's were very practical but a bit boring in comparison.
I find digital watches to be much better and useful than analog watches, in terms of usefulness digital watches win by far, analog watches are good for fashion/jewelry
Hey !!
I want my watch back !
One of the most entertaining channels on RUclips! My uncle had one of those watches that 007 had (well I am sure it was not the exact one but a knock off). It was so amazing to press the button and the time would appear in the middle of the black screen. We all thought it was some high tech marvel. Now I have a Microsoft Band and it is pretty much the same thing - black screen, press a button. The more things change...
aww. i heard a bit of the puppet music then it stopped.
Skellious trollface.jpg
*It was an editing error*
Every video starts off with a copy and paste of the last one to retain the up to date patreon list.
All audio is deleted apart from the intro and outro music.
*1second* of audio from the previous video was not deleted in error.
Wow, this brings back memories. I think it was back in the early 80's I had a silver Casio Databank watch. It had a flat membrane style keyboard below the screen which you could use a finger nail to access. You had the ability to store people's name and numbers, etc in the watch along with the usual compliment of functions like calculator, stopwatch, alarms, etc. It was one of my favorite watches. Apparently SOME of the watches had a slight issue. The first time you went to have the battery replaced the watch would die and that was it. It would never turn on again. I remember I took it in to have the battery replaced where I had purchased it. The person was putting the battery in and as he was finishing up he said, "well, you may be getting a new watch today." I asked why. He said that some of these watches had a defect and after you put in a new battery, that was it, they would never work again. He finished and put the back on mine and turned it over and nothing, it was completely blank. He said yep, this is one of them. I then had to pick out another watch to replace it. Of course they were no longer selling the same exact watch so I had to get something else. I was really depressed since I loved the functionality of that watch.
I mentioned to my Dad how it seemed somewhat silly to have calculators in digital watches, and it turned out he actually used his calculator in the 80s! He used to calculate payment plan estimates for people while working as a Curry's salesman. Probably one of the only people who actually used the function for useful work.
Very eye-opening. I've been using the Casio CA-53W for over a decade, and it served me well all through high school and university (microbiology) whenever something was too time-consuming to do in my head, but didn't demand the functionality of the TI-83 handheld calculator in my backpack. It surprises me that Casio hasn't updated the design in decades, and actually many of these older watches have better functionality -- things like scientific operations and unit conversion. I went to dozens of watch retail stores recently and was dismayed that NONE of them carried a calculator watch. In a parallel universe where this technology had not gotten dropped like it was hot, my dream would be something capable of graphing, entering formulas with variables, and the ability to store and work with lists of numeric values in a way that isn't just a shitty, over-glorified text file like data-bank watches have.
this watch is 1000 times cooler than the Casio lcd. LCD looks so cheap
LCD doesn't work in the cold and can form the "ink drops". I have never seen an LED fail.
agreed
I bet you'd have a better chance at repairing the led before the lcd's
i saw led fail on cb channel transmitter display or frequency display. but tht's due voltage surge, the watch is only connected to the batteries so that won't happen unless you 'r striken by lightning .
Looks so cheap because you were never stuck with a hp calculator with led display
I got my first calculator watch in 2009 (when I was 9), and I thought they were really new and advanced. Today I learned the 80s didn't just have such watches already; they even had touchscreens and handwriting recognition as early as then.
I'm watching this video on a Hewlett Packard computer right now. full circle
Love you sweety
Melissa0774 crt?
@@stacy3 no. I have an HP desk top and a lap top, both flat screens. My previous comment was about the desk top.
A Warm Gun because being sweaty is not the same thing as sweetie and the other guy wrote sweetie as sweety I’m the only one that knows how it spells
Melissa0774 oh yes i understand
On 1977, I was working at a place called Chafitz Equipment Company, the “adult playground”. We sold all the cutting edge electronics, including the HP watch. This video bring back the memories.
That's amazing! Back when the UI was designed by the microcode programmer himself lol.
I had a cheap-o calculator watch in the early 2000's too. On my birthday my dad had also bought me a watch with a camera!
It had really crappy black and white display and you would transfer the files through infrared. Man that was like alien tech to me.
Thanks a lot for bringing back memories :-)
Back in the day there was supersonic transport available !
We (as in majority) didn't really have that, only rich people did.
Poor rich people of today! They can't enjoy commercial supersonic flights anymore !
Not really. Palm Treo was smarter then iPhone 7 when it comes down to such basic service as calendar and todo...
If they didn't focus all their research on smartphones they could make another supersonic airliner.
***** I see your point.
Complete with an on display indicator to remind you what century are you currently living in. Fabulous.
The last shot of the watch says 1337 . . . classy :P
Interesting video, thanks for making this.
I remember trawling through the Argos catalogue in the 80's, checking out all the features available on 'new' digital watches. I seem to remember some had built in radios & tv, even a few with basic arcade games. It would be fun to collect these.
Yeah I'm a few years late. As a blind kid, my favorite watch was the Radio Shack talking watch. It had a super loud and annoying rooster crowing alarm!
Bacon420 I always remember this old guy use to come into our school to do talks about his blindness I always remember he had this thing that buzzed when it was raining (rain detector) he also had a watch like you said tells you the time best wishes to you brother 😊👍🏻
Holy crap I had that watch too as a kid. My vision is fine, I just thought it was cool to have a talking watch when I was 8.
I know how much you put inn to the videos you are making! Great job!!
You tricked me! The music for the muppet aftershow played for about a second and then nothing NOTHING :O *tears in my eye*
Loved tech watches of the 80's, and had a calculator watch, temperature, barometric graphing watches, and even surise/sunset watch. Awesome video, of times gone by.
You could say, it's "ahead of it's time"
tun dun tssss
Astounding. The engineering that went into this!
The "triangle" is delta, Δt means change in time.
I love the look of that LED display shame it drains the battery so fast.
There was this guy I met at a bar in Dallas in the early 80's that had one of these. For that era it was amazing to me.
Triangle is actually Delta, which is the symbol for change in mathematics. HP actually recalled the watch and offered a refund because they decided to get out of the watch business and close down the repair center. LCD displays were very unreliable and short-lived at the time; they faded or bled-out. I hope you show a Seiko Receptor sometime.
This thing is amazing, the dynamic calculation, wow!
Beautiful work on another awesome video! and I'm sure someone has said this already, but I'd love to see what you have on your "wish list" of stuff to get a hold of (either due to price or availability).... you've got great taste in retro tech...
I wish I was that organised, I've got a lot of interesting things lined up, but I've already bought them.
Maybe a preview vid of stuff that youre going to make videos of, as well as things youre looking for? This video was awesome btw.
I have two Casio Calculator Watches and love them both, they absolutely remind me of being a kid.
This is from the days when Hewlett Packard was an incredible engineering firm.
I had a large collection of watches when I was a kid. I had radio watch, a couple transformer robot watches, a TV remote watch, a video game watch with a real joystick, some calculator watches but by far my favorite was one of the later iterations of the Casio Databank. It's main feature for me was the addition of scrolling text to allow for longer names in contacts. I used that feature quite frequently to "help" me out on tests. I was able to put math formulas or test answers in there so they would scroll across the screen while I was taking a test. My teachers never suspected anything as I was merely checking to see how much "time" was left to finish the test. 😉
lol
that's genius
Work smart, not hard ;-)
I thought it was a bit funny that the LED display was considered 'outdated', as essentially all modern smartwatches use LEDs (OLEDs) as opposed to backlit LCD. :)
the only useful smartwatch uses the right display ... a pebble. always on and working for weeks.
Because those were only red, and now we have all colors of LEDs. LGR made a good video about the quest to create the blue LED.
I THINK I JUST FOUND A NEW HOBBY. Thank you, Techmoan. Hope you will make many videos on these.
great video!
Thanks!
@@Cristian-og7od your welcome
Brilliant video. I had a watch in 1985. It was a Christmas present from my parents. It had calculator stop watch it even held phone numbers. But for me the best feature was what would now I guess be called The Ring tones. It played about 20 different tunes. I really miss that watch.
Great video. these watches always remind me of Dwight from the office US.
I had a calc watch that displayed the entire month on it's face and had access to it's entire calendar history back to the 1800's at least. You could scroll at high speed through history. I *loved* it!
Personally I like the look of that watch over lcd watches.
0:55 I had THE EXACT GODDAMN MODEL of that watch given to be by one of my uncles as a birthday present when I was 9 or so. I got total 'frisson' when I saw it here. :-) Good ol' Casio. I loved that watch and wore it till the strap crumbled/wore through, and by then my girlfriend (eventual wife) had bought me a nice new (albeit analog) watch, so never was replaced but nice to see again. Like an old friend.
Mine was the much more humble nr.5 at 0:37, a gift from my father. Up to this very day I remember for some reason the salesman/watch repair guy saying "these Casios are very reliable". The years that came after proved him right, but I don't have the watch anymore myself either, even though I don't recall it ever having any malfunction or issue - likely my first mobile made it redundant.
@@AkosJaccik Yeah, mobiles were definately the death-blow for most watches except at the very high end, at least until smart-watches are bringing a slight rennaisance for now. But yes, those old Casio watches, fancy or plain, they just worked. And never stopped working.
@@AkosJaccik Absolutely for truth. I don't think i ever even needed to swap out the battery on that bad boy. It was an amazing watch to be certain. Especially for a guy like me slow on the uptake when it comes to certain calculations. ;-)
pardon me while I get my magnifing glass and tweezers to do a calculation
What a coincidence, that's how I jerk off
Greasiola smol dicc
@@Greasiola ah
As a guy born in 1971 I can honestly say that tech was So much more interesting in the late seventies and early eighties than it is today. Tech was Exploding in a way that we do not see or recognise today.
Yes my dad brought home a PET in 1978 and in 1981 we had a pre launch 64. (Dad worked with computers).
I Love this stuff. I remember having a calculator watch in 1979 and a watch that someone stole at school in 1980 that had alarm tones set to dates, like Jingle bells at Christmas! And that was way back when!!!
That's a beautiful watch. Whatever happened to HP..
youfermont cussed by a fuck tonne of bloat ware
brokenSCART If you look at their current flagship laptop it's kinda good looking.
The real HP lives on in "cast offs" like Agilent and Keysight, where thankfully world leading products, innovation and service survive, albeit at a price of course. HP the company today is HP in name only, and is a race to the bottom I'm afraid and has been like that for about 15 years. I'm not an employee or dealer or anything, just someone who knows quality and innovation when I see it, and owns more HP/Agilent/Keysight test equipment than is strictly necessary.
Carly Fiorina happened to HP.
One of the worst CEO's in history. Was running for President not too long ago.
My dad used to have a similar watch to the HP one back in the very early eighties, i remember being totally fascinated by it
9:11 - An indicator to tell that it's the 21st century... so HP made a Y2K-Compliant watch in the mid-70's?
A real treat -- and more to come I hope! Reminded me of the Casio Touch Cal that I bought in the early 80s and scratched the glass within a few hours :( and of the Seiko Databank with detachable NFC-like qwerty keyboard that I got new for £40 and sold recently for nearly £100. I collect LCD and LED watches and have a gold Bulova Computron 'Driver' LED and a Jaeger LeCoultre gold LED which is quite rare in working condition. I still wear my Seiko 5 Series Sports (same as yours) day-to-day. More retro like the HP-01 please!!
In the 80's I had a calculator watch too and wore it to school for a brief period of time, until the novelty had worn off. ;-)
For the Casio Databank I had as a kid, it wasn't so much the novelty, but the flat panel keypad wearing off and flaking away at the corners.
That happens?! Shit, I should be more careful with mine.
The memo/schedule calendar version... The other one shown in this video doesn't have that problem afaik. Although the rubber can still wear out.
Im one of the few people who wore-out the Casio rubber buttons (i worked in a stores and used it all day)
pauljs75 no one likes a worn out rubber!
great video I want one of these watches. this video will go down as one of the great things I've seen you my lifetime
You must live in Norwich
13:37, i like that meme
Impressive functions indeed. And you just have to love that look of that LED display.
Love it! You make such great videos. Just curious: how much of your narration do you script vs improv?
I'm pretty sure it's all scripted.
Nothing was written down - it's all off the top of my head albeit with multiple takes done to ensure the words fit the video that I've pre-assembled and sometimes I'll re-assemble the video to fit the words. The only parts of the videos that are ever scripted are the muppet outros as I need to keep on top of which character says what in what order and what line they are responding to.
Techmoan Ok wow... I could've sworn it was scripted by the way you talk in your videos and how informative they are with all the pictures of magazines and stuff. Massive respect for you then!
Holy shit... I don't speak that well to actual people.. And you do this without writing things down? Fucking Hell.
Thanks to this video I got myself a ca-53w, my favorite watch of all time
Still fashionable, I wear one of my Casios on the daily.
I've been wearing classic Casio watches for a long time now. My dad had them in the 80s when I was a little kid and they seemed so huge on my wrist back then.
HP used to be so cool, what went wrong.
Heat Problems.
Carly Fiorina.
Sootikins Damn, ninja'd...indeed, modern day HP is a mere shadow of the old Hewlett-Packard.
They didn't accept Steve Wozniak's computer design, because "why do ordinary people need computers?"
Sadly, they transformed from a company who made products for engineers and scientists to a company who makes products for consumers. Presumably because there's more money to be made.
There was another really cool LCD calculator watch made around the same time that had a flip down panel covering the buttons. A friend of mines Dad had one and I remember it looking so cool. Will look for it and will edit if I can find it.
Old school tech is so cool. I love that display. Too bad it only stays on a second at a time.
Very enjoyable going through your catalog after having just discovered your brilliant (USA='cool', 'interesting') hobby. Thank you, as well, for the clever music and pop culture references, e.g., "this...watch really does know what time it is", answering the question posed by the group Chicago (Transit Authority) a decade before this watch was made.