Natasha JayCasio Digital Watches from Shoppers World (1983)
Irenes (many)@Natasha_Jay it's hard to really explain the level of excitement we had, as kids, looking at this
@ireneista
Some of us still do đ
Some of us still do đ
@Natasha_Jay mostly nostalgia to us personally, at this point... they're cool, but the future they promised has happened, and has complications we're all too immersed in
@Natasha_Jay but we're happy you're able to enjoy them still!
ShadSterling@ireneista @Natasha_Jay it was a few years later that I had the watch I could program my schedule into, which looked a lot like some in that picture. I think I saw an early PalmPilot while I still had one, and owned a late PalmPilot about a decade later.
Now, I donât just miss the cool watch that didnât need to sync with a computer, I miss having a calendar on my computer that isnât really owned by some cloud provider
@ireneista @Natasha_Jay âthe cloudâ was advertised as freedom, but instead it hangs over us.
The thing I miss most about the Databank watch and PalmPilot PDA is having gadgets that work independently and arenât subject to the whims of the company that made them
(That, and having a schedule I could keep up with)
@ShadSterling @Natasha_Jay yes. we've been working hard on developing fog workflows for all our personal stuff
(you know, fog computing... the cloud is on the ground)
and moving back to device-local stuff for everything that's not collaboration-centric. it's been an interesting tour through tools we used 30 years ago
@ShadSterling @Natasha_Jay this is why we find it worth it to do all that tedious stuff that you've seen us thread about, constantly re-bootstrapping our linux phone and all that sort of thing... the freedom is almost worth it to us for its own sake, but more importantly, we're not just doing it for ourselves, we're marking a trail that we hope someday our friends can follow too
@ShadSterling @Natasha_Jay we made a calendar in thunderbird that's backed by a local file, but, we can't invite people to events on it ><
@ShadSterling @Natasha_Jay we'll have proper CALDAV some time this year, and we'll share our nix expressions, it's just more work than it ought to be
Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing@ireneista @Natasha_Jay the future has happened, sure, but that future seems deliberately awful at timepieces so I still want a watch ~Chara
@kris_of_pnictogen @Natasha_Jay this is completely fair :D
@ireneista @Natasha_Jay I have rather weird notions I admit about how making everyone believe they could trust their computer or phone to tell the correct time was sinister and malicious ~Chara
@kris_of_pnictogen @Natasha_Jay oh, yeah, like
the techniques by which corporations increase people's dependence on them for tasks we used to do easily, are taught in business school and executives wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't act like that
like, it isn't really as if we're suggesting some sort of secret plot when the evil stuff is taught in textbooks
@ireneista @Natasha_Jay oh yeah it's frustrating to know that there's a sort of insensible evolutionary process driven by the simplistic business thinking and preoccupation with dodgy "metrics"
SnowFox@ireneista @Natasha_Jay Calculator watches!
Joshua Kaden@Natasha_Jay My first day at junior high school, during the school-wide assembly, there was a sudden chorus of âbeep-beepâs marking the hour. I wasnât the only kid sporting a new Casio!
@Natasha_Jay Mine had Darth Vader on it, btw, which made me a cut above
europlus 
@Natasha_Jay @billgoats I think I had [2] and at some point likely [1]
Sara@Natasha_Jay I had the #8 there
Overdrawn at the Gravitas Bank@Natasha_Jay
I think it was 1981 that I splurged on one like the 'Gents' model shewn in the ad, but which featured a little glass capsule of tritium gas coated on its inner surface with a phosphor the let it be read in the otherwise-dark. It was adequate illumination for about fifteen years, a.k.a. ~1.25 half-lives, at which point it would have been about 2^{-1.25}2.4 times dimmer than at sale.
(A Geiger counter evidenced no noticeable readings from itâŠand no wrist-cancer decades later.)
Leia
Tina H@Natasha_Jay So many cute watches :)
And yet. In 1983 I couldn't afford them, in 2025 time has mostly lost meaning to me .....
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