Discussion
Casio Put Its 1980s Watch Highlights on One Page...
Casio built a page for the 50th anniversary of its watches that walks through the 1980s one model at a time, and a good part of it reads like a smartwatch spec sheet that showed up decades early. It hit Hacker News this week, and it's a better scroll than anything in my feed.
The touchscreen models are the ones that got me.
The Pocket Calculator Show dates the TM-100 to 1987, and Casio describes it as a watch with an FM transmitter and a microphone, so your voice could come out of a radio's speakers. It ran on two batteries, one for the watch and one for the transmitter, and the same site says that feature never showed up in another model. Casio's DBA-80 from that year dialed stored numbers for you by playing touch tones into the receiver of a push-button phone.
People bought these things.
Casio says it passed 100 million watches shipped in 1984, nine years and nine months after the first Casiotron. One Hacker News commenter saved paper route money for two or three months to buy a C-80 in fifth grade. Another pointed at the 1989 CGW-50, which showed the planets and Halley's comet, and said it's discontinued and lists in the thousands on resale sites.
If there's an old Casio in your junk drawer, I'd find its model name and look it up on that page before it goes out with the e-waste.
I want the one with the radio.
Casio says the 1983 AT-550 let you draw numbers and math symbols on the glass with a fingertip, and the LCD showed the formula and the answer. Jason Kottke posted a demo of the 1984 AT-552 years ago, and the video he shared says the touch tech didn't take off back then because it was quite unreliable. Even the 1980 C-80 calculator watch had a trick in it, since Casio says its circuitry could work out which key you meant when you pressed two at once.