Boy, you've hit the nail right on the head. In 1975, for my 18th birthday, my parents said they would buy me a Rolex. But I said that I'd rather have one of the new fangled quartz watches (a Seiko with an analogue face) which was the same price. Six years later when it packed up I took it in for repair, but the shop said it wasn't worth it because the could sell me a similar new watch for £30. We really didn't realise in the 1970s that electronics were about to drop in price so drastically. I remember my parents buying a Grundig transistor radio and it cost a week's wages. Can't help wondering what the Rolex would be worth now.
70's comedian Gallagher used to have a joke that went "Is it bad taste to give a digital watch to a one-armed man?" This only makes sense if you realize about the button-push for display.
In the first or second season of Saturday Night Live they had a fake commercial for an LED watch. It had four buttons, two on each side. The joke was all four had to be pressed to display the time, three could be done by the wearer but the fourth had to have someone _else_ press it. At the end the voiceover said: ''The Whizbang... Like asking a stranger for the time''.
The author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, made a lot of digital watch jokes. Form Wikipedia: Earth's population are described in the first novel as "so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." When Arthur Dent temporarily loses his left arm as a consequence of the Infinite Improbability Drive, he panics upon realizing he can no longer operate his digital watch. Hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings built the supercomputer Deep Thought in part to comprehend why people spend so much of their lives wearing digital watches. There is video of him discussing it here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-P0keUhMiZ44.html
The team went very far with waterproofing, the buttons aren't connected to the module with gaskets, they are actually cobalt magnets activating reed switches.
I can't understand why it is that when someone retires they get a nice watch. For the first time in their life they don't care what time it is and NOW you give them a nice watch. Shouldn't they get that when they start the job? lol
Bargain Boondocker Watches are more jewelery or fashion accessories than things specifically to tell the time, as you could always get cheaper watches that did the same thing. For a man to receive it as a gift it might be the most expensive accessory they have and potentially a family heirloom eventually. It's like when certain sports or universities or whatever give you a special ring, or when someone gives you nice cufflinks. They either have no purpose or there are cheaper things that do the same job, but that's not the point. It's function is secondary.
Thanks for the video, well done! When the P2 came out in 1973, it cost more than I was making in a month, in the USAF. I was dazzled with the introduction of the Hamilton LED, it was so cool. Last year I saw an eBay ad featuring a P2, and thought DAMN, I can afford one now! I have a P2 Tiffany & Co. that I worked on and got running, and a P3 gold filled. In the late 70s, I bought a Compuchron for about $12, just so I could have an LED watch, but it and all others had the LED bar segments. Now, with my P2, I check the time often, just to see the LED dot segments. And to think...it only took me 45 years to get a Pulsar. Next, I'm looking for a 1974 white Corvette coupe with saddle interior. Hmmm, I've waited for that for 45 years, too...
"This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. .... And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches." Douglas Adams
When I was a kid I had a LED watch that someone gave me with no band (in the late 80's) and I loved the display with all the teenie led dots.... So I hooked it up to 2 taped together "D" cell batteries and rigged the screen to stay lit somehow. It looked like a bomb and was no longer a watch... But I loved the display and it was my bed clock. I slept with it for quite a while.
Christmas of ‘78, my parents bought me a Texas Instrument LED watch. Very 1970s-looking with a silver stretch-band, black edges around the sides of the watch, a silver bezel, and black-looking display area (until you press the button and the LED lights up, of course). Looked like something a Star Wars StormTrooper would wear, which of course my 8-year-old self found fascinating at the time. LOL
LMacNeill I think I got that same watch in Christmas of 1978 when I was also 8 years old. Funny to still remember it in such detail today. It really was a cool thing at the time. :)
I didn't get a watch, I got a pen with digital clock on it! It was already early 80's , so I guess it was not that expenses, but for a kid like me, it was priceless...I was 11 in '81, but I do remember my father wearing a watch with red led displays...
I remember watching an episode of Happy Days with my family back in the mid seventies. I commented to my dad that Potsie (one of the characters) was wearing a digital watch. My dad took this as a hint that I wanted one for Christmas. I said I was pointing out the fact that they didn't have watches like that back in the fifties. I still got my first digital watch that Christmas though!
I never thought that LED or LCD watches had ever been luxury items! When I was a kid in the 80'/90' you can find them as gift in the washing machine detergent paks.
A note on static discharge and electronics. Back in the 70's the die geometry was way larger (20 micron) compared to today (0.2 micron or sometimes smaller) so from that standpoint they were less sensitive. However the static protection circuitry on the chip pins amounted to - - - bugger all. Nothing what so ever - dilly squat - zip - nada and nothing. These days even CMOS (which used to blow up if you even thought about static electricity in the same room in the 70's) has built in Shottky's and all sorts that mean you stand a fair chance of the chip working if you poke it after shuffling across a nylon carpet then attach yourself to a van de graff generator for half an hour. Some of the MIL-STD human body models are in effect 2000V off about 30pF. That is a hell of a poke to something that makes a pin prick look like the marianis trench.
That size of a .2 microns die shrink isn't correct anymore. CPUs are about to enter the Angstrom era, and they're currently around 20 to 8 NM. So add a 0 to his statement and he's closer, but right now commercial CPUs are about 180 nanometers smaller than .2 microns.
For people confused why Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy made references to "people who thought digital watches are a really neat idea". This is the era Douglas Adams was writing the first book. And it got published just as the back lash was starting to happen, which made the reference twice as funny.
When I was a kid in the early 90's digital watches we're being very heavily marketed as trendy and cutting edge. Yet you could get a cheap one for about five bucks. Granted that's like 10 bucks today. Still, backlit LCD watches we're treated as the thing that would make you the talk of the play ground. I read the Hitchhiker's Guide series for the first time at around the age of 10 when super bright blue backlights were new and I STILL thought that joke was on point.
@@OtakuUnitedStudio Everyone I knew wanted a Timex of some description with Indiglo. To be fair; it was a fairly decent backlighting system at a time when most were lacklusture.
@@bobdole4694 most of the "backlights" on watches before Indiglo were tiny, impotent LEDs that were neither bright not well positioned. Indiglo was like the first actual backlight.
While I assume most people would devalue the watch for having the personalized engravings but to me that's what makes it more special. It's not a pristine museum piece, it was someone's personal watch with a history. Honestly I'm surprised Dick didn't consider passing the old watch down to a son or grandson. I have a lot of old possessions (mostly tools and tech) from my grandparents not just because I love old tech but because in a way having all these old things is kinda like a memorial to them.
I totally agree its strange how pristine examples that may have been shut in there case in a drawer somewhere for years are of great value. I wonder what a challenge it would be to research who Dick was and put a story to the watch. much more interesting that someone used this in day to day living. I think its nicer to have some history and provenance showing that the item actually wa used for what it was intended and stood the test of time .
If the office whip-round turned up the equivalent of $2000 I imagine he was working for a pretty big and successful company, and was probably pretty senior, if not CEO, when he left. That should narrow it down some. Would probably have been a pretty technological company, too, an older middle-aged guy who still appreciates new tech.
That's part of why my dad bought the gold Swiss movement pocket watch he found at a pawn shop - it was dated and personalized, so even though it cost less it was more valuable to him.
Loved this. It was a real trip back into my childhood in the early 70s. I remember Ford having a pulsar but most of all Telly Savalas as Kojak has one. I saved up to get one from watches of Switzerland but could only raise 75 quid. The sales guy told me LED would never last as LCD could be seen in the sunshine. But then he told me an analogue quartz was the future. I bought a seiko SQ. loved it. Wore it for ten years until I forked out for my first Rolex Datejust. This was at the time Rolex was still making the vile oyster quartz. I still have my Datejust 40 years on. It was the start of my collection. I do remember pages of newspaper ads for LED watches. All for about 15 quid. This would have been in the mid 70s. We all had them. Texas Instruments did one. The seiko...? I gave to a friend who emigrated to New Zealand. He wore it until it 2011 when it vanished in the earthquake. Anyway. Thanks for the video. It brought back many memories.
We enjoyed your 1970's LED Wristwatch Video. My wife Sherry, and I were most pleasantly surprised that you chose to include my custom-adjusted opening Wrench and my Batteries with homemade Spacers,(the good set !!). Great Video. Best Wishes, Eddie & Sherry Alston, England UK.
What a great video. I’ve had in my memory from school around 1981/82 a kid who got a digital watch with the red display and he pressed it and I went ‘wow’ to this day I want to buy one
This video has slightly annoyed me. My Dad had one of those in the mid 70;s back when he was telling the courts he could not afford to pay any more maintenance for my sister and I. Cheap sod.
presterjohn71 But look at your pic! You have become everything he was not--a kind and caring father! And his watch deteriorated in value quickly, so he lost doubly on that one!
My first digital was a $55-ish clone of that Pulsar. No magnets, though - nearly waterproof buttons.... Besides the cool factor, it was handy to check the time in a dark theater if the wife/girlfriend dragged you to something dull. Mostly stuck with digitals, although almost always LCD, since then. I once got a digital watch from my boss - he'd purchased a bunch of 'em for about $20 apiece, and I happened to have the programming info for the chip used to build the watch. "Here, Stu. You figure out how to set it, and you can have one. Just set mine, too!" It worked for years.... I also had a low-end Accutron, back in the 70's. College graduation gift: "If you don't graduate, we're taking it back!" I really liked the accuracy (as are many of the LCD and LED watches). Bulky, though, but since I had the cheap one.... [grin].
Ahhh, there's nothing better than a bit of Techmoan in the morning. I almost spilled my coffee at 8:38 when he said: "I suppose it's best not to rub a balloon on your head while you are doing it." His humour is amongst RU-vid's finest.
It's been too late for quite a while. I've been repairing non-working LED watches purchased on ebay for a few years, and even those fetch ridiculous prices.
Would any of you guys give $1000+ more for this? It's certainly "attractive" but to me attractiveness in these retro vintage ones lies in retro, classy, and their low price. In that order I believe.. What I'm saying is that attractiveness is in Wearing cheap too!
I had a Texas Instruments LED watch when I was in high school (1975-77). That thing ate batteries like you wouldn't believe, even if you *weren't* always mashing the button to light it up. I think they lasted maybe a month or so at most. Biggest problem was that they died *quick* with no warning (no lithium batteries or ultra-low-power CMOS chips back then!) so the only way you knew they were dead was when it just didn't light up. ;)Oh, and yes, the TI watch was so relatively cheap mainly because it only used single-segment LEDs and only had a plastic (not waterproof) case.
Ah! My own first digital watch was a Pulsar, a 13th birthday prezzy from mom and dad, albeit a far cheaper, less classic and, at least by 1982 standards, more modern LCD one. Never gave the brand name much thought, then or later. Most of my contemporaries had fancy Casio things with calculators and such. Mind you … it may still be rattling around in a drawer somewhere. May have to dig it up and take it out for a bit of a nostalgic trip :)
I've got 16 watches. Mixed bag of digital, mechanical (automatic and hand-wind) and a couple quartz mechanical. I didn't pay more than $300 for any of them and most were purchased new. I love luxury watches but not in my price range or really applicable for my lifestyle anyhow. I'm always on the look out for one of these Pulsars. They're a really cool part of horological history. Thanks, as always! Cheers!
I remember when I was a kid in the late 70s being given a Star Wars digital watch. No idea what happened to it, but I remember how elite it was having a digital LED watch.
The magnet setting was to help make it waterproof, the buttons on the P3 (Date Command) are sealed with magnets inside them that activate reed switches on the inside.
I started collecting Pulsar's ever since one day when I fortuitously noticed what I thought was a Fossil P2 copy on the wrist of a beggar that asked me for $2. It looked pristine, but on closer inspection it was a mint P2 because it had only one button instead of the 2 buttons on the Fossil reissue. I asked him what he wanted for the watch and he said "depends on what you are asking" and I thought that he must be aware of the watch's $500 value and when I timidly offered $50 he could not get it of his wrist fast enough. Ever since then I have collected pretty much every Pulsar mens model (including a NOS boxed greenie) plus several other interesting LED's and first generation LCD's including a Omega Speedmaster LCD that I scored for $80 at a pawn shop. Collecting these is relatively cheap and very rewarding on account that they were very groundbreaking for the 3-4 years in the early-mid seventies.
Techmoan LEDs sales really started taking off when the TV series ""Kojak"" was on in the early 70s and he had on a certain model. I remember that years Christmas In the USA everyone wanted one. Actor Telly Salvalas played police lieutenant Theo Kojak in NYC, it was a police drama,Everybody use to watch it, it was #1. Look on RU-vid for old shows. Thanks for the video my Friend.
just found my forgotten Pulsar P3 which i bought about 7 years ago yesterday in a box in the cellar... now i find this video which also made me check on prices for the P3 ...I`ll open a beer now and celebrate, cheers!
Sir, you really have the knack of presenting obsolete products in a way that makes me really really REALLY want them. Thanks a lot! Keep it coming! 😂😂😂
Great video, I purchased my P2 stainless steel version for 395.00 back in 73, I still have it and it still works fine! Thanks for the the video! PS, I was 19 and working at McDonald's! PS, I lost the magnet but I use a small pencil eraser sized magnet to set it...
I had a friend who bought a Pulsar watch when they first came out. It was very impressive at the time. He also bought a Pong (first home video game) when it first came out. It was another marvel at the time.
I was a boy when this watch appeared. It was a brief phenomena. Buyers were stunned when they realized you couldn't read the time in sunlight. And yes, they cost a small fortune. They are still to be found in sock drawers everywhere.
not the entire series. I actually don't noticed the watch when I saw the series, but there were definitely some flashbacks to his "slipping jimmy" times.
That was an intersting era in the history of timekeeping. It is hard to understand today, what a huge thing digital watch was, and how big improvement LCD was. And then in a few more years it had to be a quartz watch with hands, and now it's mechanical again. I think you are right, LED watches are getting a renaissance. Also, today's smart watches are similar in that they can't show time continuously.
1977 I had my first Time LED watch...loved it and have been searching for one ever since. Large LED display and easy to see...handy now as I get older and my vision is fading. Great video yet again...keep up the good work
And now we have pocket computers with always-on O-LED displays showing us the time. Time set by synchronising with a worldwide telecommunications network.
Don't forget the rise of smart watches, too. My Galaxy watch can make a phone call and send a text, is waterproof, has thousands of different watch themes, and all manner of things. And it's a lot cheaper comparatively to the LED watches in the 70's. Cool stuff.
Today when I got into my big rig I decided to put on an audiobook to pass the time. I felt that a good re-read of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was in order. All those references to digital watches! And now, here we are!
My father, who loves gadgets to this day, was very proud of his Bulova Accutron watch, which my mother gave him for their wedding in 1962. Still, I remember him talking out how much more accurate new quartz watches were, starting from the early 1970s. However, as noted in your video, the prices of those early quartz watches was well above and beyond what he could justify spending, so I didn't actually see a digital watch until 1975, when one of my cousins received one as a bar mitzvah present. I don't know what brand that watch was, but I seem to recall that the price of a LED digital quartz watch had dropped to a "mere" $175, which was still a very generous present, indeed. That's when I learned the other reason my father wasn't willing to go buy one for himself: he was a doctor, and often consulted his watch's second hand when taking patients' pulses, and the 2 seconds that the LED display was active after the button was pushed wasn't enough time to take a pulse. My cousin didn't have that watch very long, anyway, or at least stopped wearing it soon after he got it. He never managed to wrap his mind around its pushbutton controls. The buttons were either unmarked or very vaguely marked, so he would accidentally press the mode change button when he was just trying to display the time, and then couldn't remember how to change the display back to regular time mode. I also seem to recall that the time set button, despite being designed to be pressed with the tip of a pen, was not recessed enough and often got hit during the sorts of activities that 13-year-old boys typically engage in. That would cause strange things to appear on the display. (Remember, this was 1975, when calculators were still new to a lot of people, and a display like "12P" on the watch's 8-section LEDs just looked like nonsense to us.) The display would also stay lit in when in set mode, which would run the battery down rapidly. And, since the mode change button stymied him, you can imagine that the set mode utterly baffled him, so whenever this would happen, he thought the watch was broken. I don't know if the watch actually broke or its battery ran down and he decided not to bother having it replaced, but the next time he saw him (we lived about 6-1/2 hours apart by car), he was wearing a mechanical "digital" watch, which used a pair of wheels with numbers printed on them and displayed the time through a couple of windows.
I have two modern LED watches from Tokyo watch. One with numbers, one is more of a dot math based system. And I've used the last one more then the first. And handing it over to the jewelry store here that does battery changes on watches. They always ask if they should adjust the time for me to. And I always say yes. But every time I get it back with them saying " we had no clue what the display said" :P Thus it's unusual. Thus why I like it. It always caches a few eyes when I use it.
Yep. Still have my silver Texas Instruments LED digital watch from the '70's. For those of us who grew up in that era this was cutting-edge technology. Having been used to analog watches and clocks we found digital readouts new and exciting.
Mine was a gold Armitron sometime in the mid-late '70s. A Christmas gift, and my first wristwatch. At first, I kept pressing the button like any kid today that can't peel their eyes away from a smartphone ... to the extent I distinctly remember an adult mentioning it to me at the time. After the battery died a few times it become lost to the sock drawer and beyond. A Timex Easy Reader (or equivalent) replaced it for many years. Never had an LCD until very recently.
I paid about $350 for my Pulsar Exec (auto command) in 1977. It sat in the watch box for 37 years until I found out they were making batteries for it again. It's working beautifully.
As another old fart, I remember this style of led watches. Because they had limited battery life and expensive replacements you limited how often you looked at the time, which somehow made time seem precious. Great video, thanks, I had some fun memories of the ‘80s.
Really blown away by the circuit boards in there, they look just like modern surface mount boards! I've never seen anything from that era that looked so "modern"
Thanks, that was very entertaining. I wonder if you could find one of the ancient early calculators that had a stack of neon tubes to display each number? I tell people this now and they give me a look that suggests no such thing has ever existed. Unrelated but also pretty fun was a bike computer/watch I owned in the early 80's, fairly certain it was a Timex, that you could strap to a wired mount on the handlebars of your bike and record your distance and speed etc. This device went a bit berserk after a while, and started making a bizarre combo whirring/grinding noise on my bike one day, causing me to look around nervously for the source of the sound. Once I realized it was actually the watch, I saw the display was oscillating between 2 hundredths of a second endlessly, and never advancing full seconds. Sadly, it died shortly thereafter, a death I attributed to my salty perspiration shorting out the contacts on the mounts, or perhaps within the device itself.
Apple watch is not using the CUTTING EDGE technology of the time. It would have to be something with nano technology or living neurons to be comparable :)
Two years later and the price of those gold filled Pulsar P3s has gone up to between £200 and €300 on Ebay UK. I think you may have started a revival with this video Matt.
Your description about being in bed under the sheets looking at your Texas Instruments watch in the 70's caused a flood of memories for me. I used to do the exact same thing back then! I bet we even had the same model TI watch to!
my uncle had one of these. i don't remember who made it. i should ask him if he still has it, because i thought it was the coolest thing i'd ever seen when i was a kid. thanks for the trip down memory lane! :)
The inscription is kind of depressing. Makes me think Dick either died or hit on hard enough times that he had to sell his retirement watch. Unless he worked at a job long enough to get a nice retirement gift but actually hated the job, which sounds pretty miserable.
Lol at the flares comment. As a kid born in 1973 I can recall at a certain point in time at school some kids would be mocked for arriving at school in flares presumably due to them wearing hand me downs. Other kids would cruelly chant ‘FLARES FLARES FLARES’ at them
In 1976 there was a boy the year below me at school whose parents must have been loaded. He told me how they had bought him a Moog synthesizer, although in return he had to take organ lessons at the local church. I got to know him as he had back issues of Everyday Electronics some of which he lent me. The funny thing is I never got to know his name. To other members of the school electronics club I referred to him as "The Kid with the Digital Watch". That was enough to identify him in a school of 1200 pupils.
Another enjoyable trip down memory lane Techmoan! I remember 1 of my school friends getting an early 'Trafalgar' LED watch around 1975 ish, he was the coolest boy at my school & we all yearned to have LED watches, which in time pretty much all my school mates did! however as you say the batteries literally drained down before our eyes & before long all the school kids had LCD watches. Mine was an early 'Ingersol' But my mate still held his LED 'Trafalgar' sacred. I bet he wishes he still had it now ( I know I do)
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.
I remember a school friend of mine getting one back in the 1960's and they were very expensive to buy in the UK so not many had them. LCD watches drove the prices down and made them more affordable and also had a better battery life. The introduction of brands like Casio made them more affordable still and are incredible value even today with many having a 10 year battery life and great water resistance which the early watches didn't have.
If Dick retired in the 70's, say being aged 60, he would've been over a 100 by now. We can assume that the chap has passed on, probably in the late 90's, early 2000's.
I've seen these LED watches before on the Classic Battlestar Galactica series as the official timepiece of the Viper pilots, but going by how you've described them, I thought the idea of them being there was to be futuristic, not old. :P
Wristwatch nerds respect and love this. Mainly because the quality and attention to detail and forethought and toughness for the price are the best. The marker of technology is unequalled.
