ANYONE USE LED WATCH?

Not since the 70's, no display until you push a button, power hogs.

I have couple of HP01 calculator watches and Hughes Aircraft Message Watches and Hughes calculator watches. Also a Pulsar LED calculator watch. And a few “normal” LED watches. Don’t use them much, but they all work. Also have a Nixie tube watch…

http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp01.htm

http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/index.html

Sparkfun sells an LED watch kit:

I installed a Heath Kit LED clock in my brand new 1974 Chevy Van. The digits were about 3/4” high. I spent quite some time installing it and used a Polarizing filter for the lense. It came out really nice and back then digital clocks were just not available in cars. At least as far as I knew.
It became evident to me as to how advanced it was when one day while I was in a gas station, a passerby asked me what time was. I glanced over at the clock and replied “9:12”. To that he gave me a really strange look and walked on. (Back then, no one was that precise when giving the time as all clocks were analog)

A couple of years later, I used to get a digital clock module made by Motorola. I almost said online, but of course it was mail order. They were really nice too and had blue-green florescent displays.

I had that same watch … 1978 I think.

This may be straying off topic. But I get a kick out of the way people differentiate online ordering from mail order. Online ordering IS mail ordering.

yes the real problem with LED watch is that they eat so much power unless someone make rechargeable lithium battery for their power supply :frowning:

Mail order conjures up ordering by post from a printed catalogue. It’s similar but different. :stuck_out_tongue:

I've been a collector of HP classic series calculators for a while. Buy broken units, repair and restore, then sell at a profit to fund my own collection. I use an HP-97 almost daily at home.

But I never could afford an HP01 and I doubt I could restore one.

I have the SparkFun Big Time watch. Cute but not really practical. Its quite huge.

There is a company, the LED Watch Store, that makes pretty good reproductions of the old LED watches. I have one I wear from time to time. Pretty geeky.

Back in the 70's I had a few of those cheap Ti LED watches, until they became extinct. I wish now I had taken care of them.

I have at least two of every HP calculator ever built… at least a half dozen of most models. I also have around 10 HP9100A and 9100B’s… talk about a work of engineering art! No IC’s, only a few hundred transistors, non-volatile memory (turn it off in mid calculation, submerge it it a raging flood, fish it out of the mud months later, hose it down, turn it on, resumes where it left off). Very fast, CRT display, mag card reader, support for printers, plotters, optical card readers, external memory. Firmware is stored as intersecting lines on different layers of a multi-layer printed circuit board. HP 9100A/B

I use HP41C series calculators every day.

At one time I had 100 custom gears made to replace the failed plastic ones in HP97’s… went through the last ones a couple years back… hmmm, I bet my friend could 3D print some… he did laser cut some out of plex at one time.

I used to eat lunch with some of the guys that designed them (and their calculators). Interesting stories about the women that built them… they had to undergo a panty check… no nylon underwear allowed… static electricity killed the chips.

My first ever TI calc was the TR-58. Before that it was the Keystone 2050.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/eec/calcs/Keystone2050.html

Anybody remember the “Bomar Brain”? I had heard that TI held back on the supply of chips so they could dominate the market.
I had never even seen a desktop calculator until my last day at school when a friend brought me over to the business school and showed me a room full of desktop calculators. They were quite large, all with nixie tube readouts. Ironic that I should spend my entire college career carrying a slide rule and only seeing its replacement on the last day.

Awesome. I salute you sir. If I extend my HP collection I will be going back in time to the HP9100 series or the HP98xx series.

I found an aluminum replacement for the HP97 printer gear. Actually it was Katie Wasserman who found it. The hub is slightly long so it needs trimming with a Dremel, but otherwise fits perfectly. I've had to use several since that's the second most frequent cause of printer failures.

Once I'm done with flashlights, I have some home lighting projects to do. Then perhaps back to HP. ;)

Great story. And I believe it. The issue back then was the “huge” cost. We do not understand today because a tiny common handheld calculator costs just a few dollars.

But in the 1970’s it was $1,000-$2,000 for a desktop model.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/desktop_calculator_photo_libra.html

At my very first accounting job in 1979, the company Controller explained to me how he had needed the Corporate Board of Directors to approve his calculator purchase, because it was a Capital Expenditure!

Even though it’s in the 70’s, the look is futuristic with all the minimalist elements here.

cool watch glen :slight_smile:
too bad no one interested produce it again,since all cellphone vendor making a cellphone watch :stuck_out_tongue:

I wanted one of those devices that had just come out called a “calculator” when I was little and got one for my birthday. Still have my 6-digit vacuum tube display Sperry-Remington 661-D. The answers coming off its display seemed so much more amazing and real than we get now off “modern technology” like an HP12C. Unfortunately it no longer powers up.

omg, This Pulsar was like the first LED’s made?

Very nearly. The first mass produced LED watch was a Hamilton Pulsar P2 2900. It appeared in the early moments of "Life and Let Die" (a James Bond film) in 1973. Very cool at the time. Very expensive too but it only took a few years to get the price down to where a poor high school kid like me could afford one, made by TI.

Funny things I remember about wearing these. You can't be discrete about checking the time. Like you're in a conversation and getting bored, you want to check your watch, but you have to push a button and then it lights up.

You're also very conscious of power. You don't want to press the button too often or you'll be changing batteries. So you learn to look around for alternatives. Can you catch a glance off someone else's watch? Is there a wall clock around?

At one time I modified an aluminum gear from Stock Drive Products (cut off part of the hub and insert a piece of brass tubing as a bushing). But it turned out it didn’t cost much more to have them fab a small run of custom gears.

I have also fixed the drive rollers using a polyurethane rubber (HTPB) more commonly used as a binder in solid rocket fuel.

I don’t wear a watch.