The Nerd Watch Message Board is up and running! Visit an online community of LCD wristwatch collectors to socialize and share information about digital watches. —Nerd Watch Museum (Pocket Calculator Show)
I had a calculator watch in high school. It had a touch screen. This was in about 1984 — it was awesome. I daydreamed about being able to play text adventure games on a watch, and I even sketched out what the interface would look like.
A girl who hadn’t spoken to me for three years asked me to borrow it for a final exam. She returned it to me busted, and sort of mumbled something approximating an apology.
For some reason, I didn’t really mind. She had given me the excuse to smash the broken watch to bits. I photocopied the pieces, and inserted the photocopy in my journal.
I won’t go into all the details, but this girl had caused me some adolescent angst (not of the romantic variety, more of the misunderstanding-and-gossip variety), and I felt good about my decision not to get angry with her for it. In fact, four other girls who watched me smash my watch were fascinated by the whole thing. While I don’t know that there was anything particularly macho about smashing a nerd watch, I still had an entourage of girls following me around and asking me for pieces of the wreckage. All in all, I think it was a fair trade.
I had a gold casio calculator watch that I got for my 11th or 12th birthday. A remember a girl making fun of it in school, but she didn’t smash it and I actually ended up dating her in high school. I still love watches (girls too). I have a watch blog here but it is dedicated to automatics, not calculator watches
Thanks for the link, Kashif. On the upper left of this page are two pictures of the watch that features in my blog story.
http://raredigitalwatches.com/digital/casio/cal4.html
Edit, 27 Dec 2022: Here’s the Wayback archive of the above link.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090703151147/http://raredigitalwatches.com/digital/casio/cal4.html
Hi,
Here i also host a Nerd Digital LCD Watches Museum / Gallery. Hope you like it.
http://RareDigitalWatches.com
Thanks
Kashif
I set up blogs.setonhill.edu for SHU (with help from a few techies) and I administer it. I’ve written about it here:
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/e-text/weblogs/blogosphere.htm
This site, however, uses open-source software created by a former student of mine, Will Gayther.
MovableType lets me manage scores of student blogs with a reasonable amount of effort. Will’s jwebog software is much more flexible. When I work really hard, I can make some modest changes to the coding that makes the site work better for me. I wouldn’t have that freedom if I used an off-the-shelf tool. I plan to keep using jweblog as long as Will is able to support it.
Thank you! I think the font is called “White Rabbit.” I’m sure it was free. :-) My first WWLYDT design broke when Blogger added features, so I pretty much had to redesign or quit using Blogger.
The text-adventure idea is neat, and who knows? The first sketches often evolve into something even cooler than you imagined. :-)
Looks like Seton Hill has a campus-wide implementation of Movable Type. Are you using it? Do you like it? I’d love to offer something like that to our faculty, but usually the hard part is convincing the administration that people will actually use it. :-)
Hah! That’s a great story.
By the way, I love the command-line interface design on your blog… it inspired me to sketch out a redesign for this blog that uses text-adventure conventions. I doubt I’ll actually implement it, but it was fun regardless.
I had a friend in high school–also in 1984–who used to figure split tabs and tips in restaurants on his calculator watch (no touch screen, but he always had a ballpoint pen on hand). It drove me (as well as the other girls in our group) insane. A year or so later I borrowed one from another friend when I was going home from college, and managed to beat him to the ticket with it. It was a pretty good joke. You know, as nerd humor goes.
BTW, I have to wonder what those girls wanted with the watch wreckage. Maybe they were going to use it as a warning to deter other young men from figuring out tips in restaurants with their watches–kind of like stringing up the heads of slain enemies on the city walls to scare away potential attackers. :-)