I can’t remember much about my first LCD watch, but most likely Casio and it was a stainless steel case, produced some time between 1976 to 1979. Had an alarm, a light button and its most notable feature was four distinct stopwatch functions. First was your standard ‘start/stop/reset’. Then two distinct lap timers: the first would reset the clock to zero for each lap (so useful for timing each leg of a 4x100 relay race), while the second was the normal lap timer. The fourth timer was (I think) just adding a pause function (so: start/pause/restart) and the user manual suggested this was to allow you to change an LP record over and resume timing to calculate the total music time.
It’s possible that I remember the LCD screen showing a different letter to denote which stopwatch mode was being used: ?/F/L and then P.
The stopwatch only showed 1/10 seconds, not 1/100ths. Four buttons on the side, no extra ones on the front.
I’m just looking for the model, not to purchase. Any sites that might identify such an early digital watch?
Hm, page failed a couple of times but ONE MORE TIME and it loaded, and you weren’t kidding! I don’t see mine there but I think this was it:
Thanks, brought back fond memories. That was my senior year in high school, in Palo Alto, and in several college-level classes (what would now be APs) there were lots of geeks: every hour on the hour there would be a span of several seconds when all of our watches beeped their hourly chimes. Always made me snicker to myself.
The original joke from (The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) was actually written in reference to early LED watches which, in order to avoid quickly burning through batteries, required the wearer to use their non-watch hand to illuminate the display…which made it less convenient than just a normal manual or self-winding mechanical watch. (They were also less accurate than a chronometer-grade mechanical, although being solid stare and encased in giant ‘cushion’ cases were substantially more resistant to shock and impact damage.)
By the time the TV series was made, the joke no longer had context as LED watches with a constantly updated display became popular, although it still probably wasn’t as baffling to American audiences as why the name “Ford Prefect” was supposed to be peculiar. I suspect if Adams were writing today he’d replace “digital watches” with smartphones and how they are enabled by effectively making the user dumber.
Thanks for the link. The bottom of page 4 has a pair of Casio ‘S-002’ models with a familiar-looking face (date format in a small box on the top right).
Gives me some avenues for further research, but the number of models is quite a bit more than I was expecting.
