Talking watches still exist, for the blind. Technology evolved in a way that they now have enough memory to have enough phrases pre-recorded, instead of voice-synthesizing.
Yep. My dad is fully blind and he had that RadioShack box when it was new. Fascinating how things have evolved from that to now we use VoiceOver for Apple Watch
When he made the watch say “F$&k it”, I giggled like I was twelve again, and then looked around to make sure my mom didn’t hear it... from three states away.😆
Pro tip: if you live an apartment, you can use anything loud enough as a talking clock, at least in the middle of the night. If you make enough noise, you'll inevitably hear a voice telling you the time before long.
It is literally an old anecdote: One guy showing his apartment to another and guest notices large copper bowl on a wall. He asks: - What is that? - It's a talking clock. Let me show. He bangs bowl loudly and somebody screams from behind the wall: - IT IS 2 FUCKING AM
Do it often enough, and you might even get a very helpful letter informing you of how much time you have left before you have to move out. Really useful for figuring out when you have to start house-hunting again. Convenience all around!
In the early 90s when watches were cheap, we'd all sync them to the second with the electronic school bell system, then turn on the hour chime, so we'd all sound off at once, and we thought that was cute. But then, one of us got the idea of getting every kid to offset by exactly one second and turn on the hour chime, resulting in a different watch beeping for about 20 seconds. Oh boy did that upset the teachers. The principal prohibited the hour chime school-wide really quick. (The ADHD kids like me were still allowed to use the alarm to remember to go to the nurse to get their meds, heh.)
Lol we did that too back in the 80's. We even had the rich kid who had the channel changer watch & could turn the TV off/on during a movie multiple times lol. That watch was pretty damn crazy for it's time.
In my primary school I remember various densities of hourly beeps happening spread across about 5 minutes, a couple before and a couple after the actual hour.
I once woeked with a blind web developper, and he was probably better at the job than many i met over the years. It was always wzird walking into the open space and seeing him typing in front of black screens and later that day get to review his code on our gitlab... Just wow ! :)
@@benjamineldridge769 What. Aside from the fact that that relieves one of my greatest fears (losing my eyesight to some accident and then being unable to actually do anything, in particular programming).... HOW. How on earth do you do programming if you're blind??
The talking watches from radio shack always seem to last longer than the specialty ones though. Although, the talking watches from radio shack looked kind of funny but still, the band always seem to wear out before the watch did.
@@CoreDreamStudios there was once a lady that had 69 babies, that was 222 many babies so she went to 51st street to see doctor x who gave her 8 pills and she came out 55378008 (6922251x8=55378008)
I love the design of that pyramid clock. I can imagine it on the desk of a business man in one of those late 80's business buildings that have a metallic look, like the one in Gremlins 2 or the one in Who's Harry Crumb.
I have an original Radio Shack “Illuma-Storm” plasma globe, still works flawlessly, as well as a newer “Lightning Storm” both solid state Tesla coils. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GtdBnCspdcs.html
The pyramid clock looks like it would fit in perfectly on the desk of some evil mastermind or super villain at the top of the tallest and most menacing skyscraper in the city
In the 80s my friends and I would set our watches one second apart and sit next to each other. When the hourly beep would happen it sounded like the beep was moving along the row. 😁
Hey it's mr Brian. I remember when we did that. I always fucked up the time and my beep would disrupt the chain and you guys would always beat me up for that. Good times.
I had the Seiko pyramid one! It was a gift from my step-grandmother (who specialized in awful gifts). It took so long that I had to resist just picking it up to see the time.
Nearer 20 years and it's not really engineering it's just very simple without much to go wrong apart from electrolytics drying out and that can happen however well you engineer something. Modern equipment is often more highly stressed running at higher current /temperature levels.
You don't see that much in consumer products these days. Companies unfortunately learned that most people like cheap products so there was a "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing. To get there companies cut corners and reliability and longevity suffered. This also means that when the product that you bought finally breaks after a few months or years you gotta go back to the store and buy another one. Meanwhile the people who owned the company that made your crappy product are laughing their way all the way to the bank to cash the check you wrote them. An unfortunate aspect of modern capitalism.
I watch these when I go to sleep simply for the fact it’s so interesting that my brain can keep listening and because his style of recording is so comfy
I had a talking watch in the 80s that was branded "Omni," but clearly had the same guts as the Radio Shack one. The alarm started with same chime, and its voice was the same, but instead of the Bach Minuet it played the *Boccherini* Minuet, which was liltingly charming. It was a lot more fragile that that RS one appeared, so it lived in its included desktop stand instead of on my wrist.
Love looking at these older clocks to see how the technology evolved. I still use an Alarm Clock (non-talking) that was manufactured in the late 80’s, and it works great! They definitely made things better in those days. Also, the tune playing on the Watch Alarm is a version of Bach’s Minuet in G. Cool! Enjoyed the video!
I truly miss radio shack. It was always fun to go in and see some of the stuff they had, that as you said, you literally couldnt get anywhere else. My dad gave me his 'portable' (cuz it had a handle to carry it. Not cuz it was easy to lug around. it prolly weighed 40 pounds) reel to reel player. I used it to record all kinda of stuff. But the only place you could get blank reels, even in the early 80s, was Radio Shack. I must have bought 50 of them over the 4-5 years I had that thing.
A good part of the world died when Radio Shack declined and left us. Teenage me would never have believed the high tech future would be a future without a place to browse and buy random DIY tech stuff.
Some like the pyramid are more like the stuff from mall stores like Sharper Image or Brookstone, where they'd have all the weird office toys and niche electronics.
My great Aunt collected clocks, she had one of those pyramid clocks and use to chuckle at the Japanese accent. I don't remember it sounding as bad as it does in the video, but it has been many years since I've heard it. It may still be in the family somewhere. I also remember that weather radio from Radio Shack, I think that must have been very popular.
What a blast from the past! My mom had the "Micronta" alarm clock from the Radio Shack ad for many, many years. The voice was identical to the TI-driven alarm clock you demoed first. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I love how the little Vox Watch says "attention please" with it's alarm. So cute! I like talking clocks, they're practical. I was sick recently and moving my head constantly to see my clock was making me dizzy, but my phone has the google assistant so I could just ask and get the time. Unfortunately the Google assistant is a poorly designed mess of an interface so it's less useful then some of these clocks were haha, even if you had to press the button for the clocks.
Seems like the same voice capabilities that the Sharp ELSI-Quarts CT-660 talking alarm clock had - that "attention please," the voice, the alarm tone, so nostalgic to me as my Dad's stepdad had a CT-660 (which I inherited after he died, but ... can't seem to find)
2 года назад
The thing I use Siri most often for is to ask the time when I don't want to get out of bed.
10:50 My dad had one of those weather radio cubes. I wish I still had it, was a good little radio. 👍 I see going back in the RS catalogs that it came out in 1970 and with him passing away a few years later, he had to get it pretty much when it came out, in either 1970 or 71. I was just a toddler back then and would listen to it for hours my mother said. It worked up right until I broke it by dropping it and landed on a corner and broke into many pieces that time. 😢
9:59 Man, that was wild- literally just as I was typing out a comment describing the little talking clock my grandma had, that I loved playing with as a kid, you whipped out the exact one she had. I used to carry it around her house and just press the button over and over again until my parents wanted to take it from me, but my grandma wouldn’t let them. I haven’t seen it in years, although I’m pretty sure my parents probably still have it somewhere. But, damn, that brought back memories.
My grandma had things like this all over the house. She was blind , and in the eighties we shopped at radio shack for all this stuff, the clock The Watch, it was really cool when she got to watch
It’s been a long while since I’ve watched your videos, so I’m on a catching up binge watch while I’m coming down from a horribly crippling migraine. Your videos are so soothing. They’re gentle enough that they don’t hurt my ears and eyes when I have a migraine, and your voice is always level tone & gentle. I’m not the best at understanding most of what you talk about but I thoroughly enjoy it regardless. Thank you for making your content the way you do.
I have chronic migraines too and you're right his voice is soothing and it doesn't hurt in my head as much. I'm sorry you're dealing with migraines as well, but I'm in the same club as you so I know what you're going through it sucks.
Being blind since birth and born in 1978, I have lots of experience with different talking clocks. The Spartus is one I first saw in 1986. It has basically the same speech chip and functions as the Radio Shack VoxClock III which I got for Christmas in 1985. The Radio Shack VoxWatch is something I first saw in December of 1985, and its chip is based on that of the Sharp Talking Time I from the early 80's. The Talking Time I has a different alarm tune (Boccherini Minuet in A) and a few different features. Not that it'd be worth much, but with the distinctive chips the Spartus has, I wonder if it could be emulated in MAME or similar?
I'm only in my 30s, but man this brings back memories. I still have Dad's Micronta digital alarm clock that looks awfully similar to the Spartan clock without the console extending below it. Had it since I started school in 1992. Dad had that Realistic Weather Radio since as far back as I can remember, and I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out how it worked as a kid.
14:18 Ironically, I just watched a video where they also mentioned that slang "sick" was relatively new, but apparently they found footage of skateboarders using the term, I believe in the 80s. Either way, it wasn't a widespread term until later. If anyone is interested I'll post a link the video.
I remember using it back in the late '80s, along with a lot of other kids, in place of "cool" or "awesome" to the confusion of a lot of adults. Mind you, I grew-up in California, so there were a lot of suffer and skater terms floating around, including the "shaka" hand sign, the "Cool S" graffiti sign, and elaborate hand-slaps that ends with pinched fingers sliding apart to go to the lips smoking an imaginary joint. It was all quite tubular, my dude.
Your channel is so great. It's like nostalgia overload for me. In my teens, I can remember pouring through the Radio Shack catalog for hours and just dreaming! Then in my later teens when my "cooler" friends were figuring out how to score booze, my friends and I were in the electronics section at Radio Shack figuring out what to build next.
My grandma gave me a pyramid shaped one (different than the one in this video) that had a really creepy bitcrushed rooster sound for the alarm. I hated that alarm so much, especially when the batteries were getting old and the pitch would change
Was it white with an orange-ish colored button? I think we had one like that for my dad, more of a rectangular base than a square, still a pyramid shape.
This video reminded me of a wristwatch my late great grandma gave to me that audibly told you the time when you pressed a button on it. I was so fascinated/amused by it that she got me one of my own. I don't remember the brand, but it was big, silver and it made a ding or gong sound before telling the time in a robotic voice. It's been 11 years since her passing, thank you for bringing back that memory.
Speaking of NOAA weather stations, my car is a 2000 Saab, it has 3 radio settings; AM, FM, and WB. The weather band actually works, and since I live in Florida it can be handy. My car is my only weatherband radio though lol...
I'm reminded of my mother's Radio Shack Alarm Clock. The alarm sound was a rooster crowing. It was solid black with a LCD display, a few aqua colored switches and a large aqua button for having it speak the time. When setting the time I had to listen to constant loud ding noises followed by the voice telling me the time. I still have it somewhere in my house.
Very jealous of that Spartus wood grain Alarm clock. I love the old Texas Instrument TMS5100 speech synthesizers chips that don't seem to be in production anymore. Those by far had the perfect balance of articulation and timbre. Hopefully one day I'll be able to snag a functional piece that can sit on my desk with one of those chips in it. Sort of like an Alarm clock! Great video as usual
13:45 Must have been a fairly popular tune in the 80s ...does anyone remember the musical duel in "Electric Dreams" (1984)? The piece is "Minuet in G Major" by Christian Petzold (frequently erroneously attributed to J.S. Bach) Also 5PM had me rolling!!
yes.. originally by Bach!... composed for Electric Dreams by the synth master Giorgio Moroder (yes the same "my name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everyone calls me Giorgio!")
Good spotting of that watch tune. I was looking to see if anyone noted it was a Minuet, as I was made to play that tune on a piano when I was taking lessons as a kid. 😁😁😁
As primitive as the first one looks now I’m still impressed it was made nearly 60 years ago. Just consider what technology existed 60 years before that…
I had a the star wars talking clock as a kid. My parents regretted getting it for me because I would purposely let the alarm go and go to listen to C3P0 lol
Love your videos man. Thank you. You have increased my interesting in this generation of tech a ton! Also allows me to under tech to a much deeper level.
You can imagine that any modern talking watch would be rigorously tested and any such 'fun' words immediately locked out and expunged in case someone had a laugh. Naughty, naughty! 😄
I love my realistic brand gear, they take me back to some happy times when i got to go to Tandy shop in Australia and see some grand things on the shelves. When i can i try and find the stuff i saw on the shelf and add it to my collection, hopefully still working.
0:45 - the fact that David points out that the girl specifically is probably still alive and not the boy implies that he knows the boy is dead as he has already killed the boy and the girl is probably next.
Radio Shack was the bomb back in the day, I have many childhood memories of hearing the time announced at a few friends houses. you should totally do one on NOAA radio's that would be fun.
My friends Dad had several of these, one at the house and one or two at the farm they had 5 miles outside of town. It was the Midwest, so these would go off with a siren alarm sound when there was a storm warning or tornado warning and then automatically key on the speaker so you could hear the announcement.
I have a regular Spartus alarm clock from the 80s and I still use it. Same basic design with the wood look and just a smaller control panel in the front.
I also bought a regular Spartus alarm clock back in the ‘80s, which also had the same basic design. It was really inexpensive but worked for over 20 years.
This was good! I enjoyed learning about this, I don't know much about talking clocks at all so this was quite educational for me. Not much else to say other than good job!
I always thought that was a long-lasting hold over from WWII. There's a LOT of copper in a proper UK plug, and it would have saved a lot to manufacture devices with the plugs to be fitted by the end user. Or perhaps it was an artifact from plugs not being standardized until much later than electrical goods becoming popular.
@@evensgrey Yah, I figure it was a holdover from then too -- especially since the UK changed plug and outlet designs right after WW2. People didn't change all their outlets right away, so it made sense to sell things without plugs, and wire up the kind of plug you needed. Meanwhile, here in the US, the 2-prong version of our plugs and outlets was already a long-established standard. EDIT: And the 3-prong version had already been invented in the 1920s.
@@AaronOfMpls My current apartment was (or so I'm told) built in the 1930's, doing a rather bad imitation of a rich family home from about 1880. Two of the rooms in my apartment have what might be original electrical outlets, on the floorboard on the OUTSIDE walls, two prong, no polarization. (I've got modern outlets on the common interior wall of the two rooms. 15 Amps is plenty of power for everything I have in here, fortunately.)
@@AaronOfMpls my house still has a few round pin bakalite sockets. They are part of a disconnected ring main that no one bothered to remove when the house was renovated and rewired. House is about 60 years old and in the uk.
The watch brought back so many memories. So much so I remembered the tune as you played it on the alarm and it reminded me of how many times it used to go off in class at school as I used to let it play at my teachers annoyance lol
Whenever I'm looking for my nostagic trip down PC memory lane (haha so punny) it brings me right here everytime. Something about the synth intro, the throwback information and general 8-Bit Guy style I really enjoy watching as well as some unexpected laughs. Thank you 8-Bit, always looking forward to the next bit of PC history you bring us!
I actually think the VoxClock looks cooler than the Seiko Pyramid clock. It looks high tech while the pyramid looks chintzy. I could imagine seeing the VoxClock on Dick Tracy or Get Smart haha. Also, I remember saying "sick!" for something that was cool back in the early 90s!
Being about 9 years older than you my first real watch thrill was the Casio calculator watch around 1980. Later on the scientific calculator watch blew my mind away but freaked out the school staff when it came to my math exams! Had to remove it before I went in! 🙁 Still aced the exams though! 😅
I received the Vox clock for a gift. I loved it for years. I moved in with someone who hated it. Comprises we make. Good memories. Thanks this was fun to watch.
I love the nostagia you give me for Radio Shack. My dad worked there from 84 to 91 I believe, and I got to see a fair bit of their computer tech growing up.
That Seiko clock was bought at Seidenburg Luggage. My parents and grandparents used to shop there all the time. 2 Locations just outside of Philly. They were the best!
It’s interesting that you mentioned that RadioShack made both a weather radio and talking clock, because they did eventually make a weather radio that also has a talking clock in it
I'm getting "Electric Dreams" vibes from that Vox Watch. The song it plays was featured as a duet between the cellist, Madeline (Virginia Madsen), and Edgar the computer. I think the watch itself was also in the opening scene of the movie as well. By the way, the voice samples on the Radio Shack Vox Clock sounds like a young Joanne Daniels.
Thanks! I was looking for a comment clarifying this cause, as someone who isn't a native speaker but absorbs a lot of American culture through movies, tv shows and games, that confused the heck out of me.
Did anyone else's OCD kick in when he didn't play the "hers" alarm on the Spartus and went straight to dismantling it? I need to know if it's the same alarm tone as "his"!!!
@@Stevie-J Now I'm worried I've remembered the 2nd alarm wrong. It might be B D G *A*, now that i've been hearing it playing in my head. The internet is, indeed, magic! ◡̈
@@Pants4096 Geez, I just figured it was an "Alarm A" and "Alarm B" for couples that wake up at different times (one to get the kids ready for school, one to get ready for work) so I'm glad someone knew differently.
I've been poking around old newspapers and catalogs trying to find out more about Spartus and that clock, since the release date was in question. The earliest reference I can find of a talking clock from Spartus is in late 1982, a newspaper advertisement for their earlier AVT model 1410. (AVT stood for "Audio Visual Time" for which they also filed a trademark for in 1982.) The clock featured in your video is a slightly newer model number, a model 1411. The 1411 was apparently also sold at Radio Shack where it was known as the "Micronta VoxClock 3," that version of it debuting in Radio Shack's 1985 catalogue on page 148 under number 63-906 and labelled "New for '85." The prior VoxClock 2 that your video also features had previously hit shelves in late 1983 (that one apparently a rebranded Reizen according to another commenter). So with the immediately prior models in both product lines (Spartus' 1410 & Micronta's VoxClock 2) releasing in late 1982 and late 1983 respectively, and Radio Shack's rebranded version debuting sometime in 1985, it's likely that the dates on the chips do correspond roughly with its release. Perhaps as early as 1984 but probably not much earlier. Safe to assume that the Spartus 1411 is a ~1985 release despite its late 70s style. Regarding Spartus itself: The earliest reference I ran across of this company making clocks was in a newspaper in 1958, though I saw references to their camera equipment in 1941. I didn't dig farther back than that. In 1964 it was reported that manufacturing was being moved from Chicago to Louisville, the headquarters later listed on your clock. In 1996 Spartus was acquired by General Time (Westclox), and then in 2001 the bankrupt General Time was bought out by Salton Inc, although they later sold off their entire time products business in 2007 to NYL Holdings LLC. NYL Holdings still sells alarm clocks under the Westclox name today, but the Spartus branding goes unused.
It really speaks (lol) to how distinct that TI voice synth chip is that even though I never had one of those clocks, I instantly recognized it as the same one as in my old speak-and-spell. Never been a voice quite like it before or since!
"The Thinker clocks are two miniature replicas of the bronze sculpture of the same name by Auguste Rodin. Larry Butz made two of these clocks: one for himself and the other for his then-girlfriend, Cindy Stone. The clock itself has a switch on the neck that causes it, when tilted, to say, "I think the time is [current time]..." out loud. The time can be adjusted like any other clock."
My grandfather gave me the same clock as the one you showed in the thumbnail! Also, I think mine may be a different revision, as mine says "it's" before it says the time, and when the alarm goes off, it'll speak the time before it beeps
I have one that was branded by Mentor Graphics as a tech promotion product. It says, "Almost midnight at the oasis" on the front, with a motif of palm trees. I have a feeling this clock may have been resold by quite a few different companies.
My great aunt Mabel had both the Vox clock 2 and the Seiko pyramid at various times. She was blind and it was the only way she could tell time. Made her life easier, and I loved playing with them when i was a kid.
Some dolls used this technology too. My sister had a doll that "cried," and it used a small plastic record. When I opened it and found out, I was fascinated. My sister, well, she was not amused!
Those old "See 'n' Say" things* used a plastic record too, with a Victrola-like horn crammed inside for amplification. They had a bunch of interleaved grooves, and setting the spinner controlled where the needle dropped when you pulled the cord. * you set the spinner and pull a cord -- "The cow says... 'mooOOOOOoooo!'")
I think it would be cool to see a video about NOAA weather radio, especially the advances in the technology. Originally, messages heard were recorded on endless loop tapes, similar to 8 track. Then, they switched to a digital recording method, then to text to speech in the late 1990s. There's plenty of good information online, and even a dedicated group of weather and emergency alert system geeks.
Ah, the good old days when honest to goodness real live human beings would be there, in my local Weather Service office in Chanhassen, MN, to play the alert tone and read the severe weather watches and warnings, as well as recording the current conditions and forecasts and station ID (KEC-65 on 162.55Mhz!) that went out repeated on a loop. I miss those people's voices. The latest digital voice they use is certainly better than the first few they used, but it's still harder to understand in my opinion than the real humans.
@@Pants4096 I was born during the Text to speech era, but I've heard plenty of recordings of the live voice era of NOAA weather radio, and it honestly seems to me like it represented the area you are in a lot more, be it everything from maybe a slight southern accent in Texas stations or something. Also, whenever the warnings got especially bad, you could tell the meteorologist was trying to indicate that this was an extremely dangerous situation, whereas now those alerts are right with the same tone of voice as a minor creek rise 20 mi away.
