About this site
Your intrepid watch-herder is a child of the 70s, born around the same time the first electronic digital watches were hitting the streets. Fascinated by technology, and particularly the actual magic that is electronics, all manner of devices were serially eviscerated in an effort to compel them to divulge their secrets. After a few years of this carnage, reassembly eventually became part of the menu, only partly quenching a thirst to wield these fabulous abilities, and igniting a drive to build on this budding sense of empowerment.
Come the turn of the decade, digital watches had reached widespread adoption, and this voraciously curious youngster demanded to examine all which came his way; these miniature marvels stood out as emblems of the promise of technological progress against a backdrop which still felt like the 70s for a few years yet; many central elements of the vibe, like decor and tech, persisting for some time. Brown everywhere that burnt orange and lime green wasn’t, black and white tellies, rotary phones and valve radios, and meantime, Japan making a name for itself as the new kid on the technology block to watch. Digital watches helped make it feel as if the 80s had arrived.
Another thing which contributed to that sense of the future arriving was the lounge room telly becoming a display for a computer, perhaps most likely in the form of an Atari or Nintendo, or maybe even a Commodore 64*. Electronic gear had certainly turned a corner with the advent of Very Large Scale Integration in IC technology, and before we knew it, everything would become digital. And oh, how we laughed at pictures of our hair from the previous decade… surely we were beyond bad hair in the 80s!
It was possible to imagine a scifi world of tomorrow. Progress was racing ahead in all kinds of domains, or at least, most of them, and by the time 1990 had rolled around, we had been graced with all manner of nifty gadgets out the wazoo, Marty McFly had been back to the future, and the Berlin Wall had fallen. Things were just going to keep getting better and better… Just as long as greed really is good, at least…
* By the way, Chickenlips is back!
As the 90s ticked past, progress seemed to be accelerating – Hubble was blowing people’s minds, God’s thumbprint could be explored, and our devices were losing their corners. Also, the boundaries between various cultural streams seemed to be more porous somehow, as things became less identifiably of a particular style or genre, and mass conformity, at least on the superficial level of cultural signifiers, somewhat dissolved into a liberating free-for-all, resulting in a melting pot of music, cinema and fashion; pictures of people from this era are often harder to date than those from previous decades.
Geopolitically, for a while there it seemed as if Fukuyama had called it, with war on the decline and a proliferation of democracies in the post cold war era, but keen observers had noticed by now that many established democracies were falling victim to something akin to a termite infestation; an unrelenting multi-pronged assault on the common wealth had seen ubiquitous privatisations and offshoring, while financial deregulation and corporate mergers continued apace, ultimately rendering Agent Smith’s view of 1999 – as being the pinnacle of our civilisation – in perhaps a rather prophetic light… behind the scenes, the engines of progress were running out of momentum.
The less said about this century, the better, for the most part…
With the social contract increasingly resembling used toilet paper, and future prospects of economies and environment in freefall, nostalgia is biting harder than ever before. We could try to band together and figure out how to get to the Death Star’s ventilator shaft, shrugging off all the way a palpable sense that such efforts consist of little more than delusions of grandeur… Or we could much more easily tell ourselves not to be ridiculous, and continue to submit to an inhuman engine of destruction built from our collective venality, hubris, and idiocy, powered by nothing more than our collective consent.
Inevitably choosing the latter, we hide from ourselves in petty obsessions and surround ourselves with reminders of happier, more hopeful times – and here we are.
Step right up folks, and strap a slice of lovely Shōwa yestertech onto yourselves! Be transported, whenever you check the time, to an era when surprise and delight were engineered in, the future was so bright we had to wear shades… and leave the dystopian freemium brain rot behind. Join fellow geeks, nerds, and other ultra-cool varieties of peeps in discussing the fascinating minutiae delved into herein. Marvel at a lovingly restored collection of fabulous wrist-borne gadgets, presented in obsessive detail for the delectation of one and all.
Each product page on this site, beyond being a place for an ‘add to cart’ button, provides a manual if available, and is crammed with as much relevant detail as possible given the constraints of work, parenting, and life in general on a lone maniac – in the hope not just of providing a valuable resource to enthusiasts and collectors, but to deliver the best site of its kind. Articles on various aspects are published sporadically, offering an opportunity for visitors to interact, ask questions, offer feedback and perhaps to collaborate in group buys or even reverse-engineering efforts… Enjoy.
Even more about this site
For those who’d like to know, here’s a breakdown of the conventions employed here: some models have names given by the maker, like TimeTrack or Melody Alarm, in addition to the usual model number, while others have nicknames given by the punters, which are here encapsulated in single quote marks; for instance ‘Blue Thunder’ – most such nicknames are just the name of a movie the watch has appeared in. Casio even has a sort-of sub-brand that’s a nickname; ‘Marlin’ watches have a logo of a sailfish on them, but that’s all – there’s no official name for these. The title for some watches here includes a number at the end, which means there are or were multiples of the model in stock; this number merely reflects the order of acquisition rather than any hierarchy of condition or whatever.
Concerning the listed features of each watch, a happy medium between inadequate detail and obsessive rabbit-holing was sought, inevitably leading to some lack of resolution in this area; for instance, a ‘3/4 width dot matrix’ is only roughly accurate in many instances, and basically just means more dots than the minimum. Watches can be sorted by complexity, which is merely a count of the number of features, which as implemented is only a rough proxy for actual complexity. Any feature in the attributes table, along with a number of attribute types, can be clicked to see a list of watches with that feature or attribute, which can then be sorted by the dropdown, so you can list all watches with a 24h display option sorted by thickness, or all stainless steel watches sorted by weight, for example (although the latter option will unfortunately exclude a diamond-like-coated stainless steel watch).
Regarding dimensions, they’re generally +/-0.1mm, not because that degree of precision is all that useful, but because it’s a hell of a lot better than rounding to the nearest millimetre. For many watches, multiple case thicknesses are listed, because there’s often a dimension which applies to most of the area, but there may be buttons or a bezel sitting proud of that (sorting by thickness is perhaps a little broken because it had to pick one of those values; IIRC it’s the largest). Case widths are almost always excluding pushers and/or crowns, but including any associated bulges in the case itself. Case heights are between the extremities of the lugs. Two strap / bracelet widths are provided, the wider of which, together with the lug width, is intended for anyone considering purchasing one of these watches from somewhere else minus its strap or bracelet, to assist with determining beforehand whether a suitable replacement may be obtained.
As for the nuts and bolts under the hood, figuring out how to get a site hosted without grabbing my ankles has been quite the slog for a noob, and then there was the small matter of learning to wrangle WordPress; many hurdles and limitations have been encountered during the site’s design. The usual solution in such instances is apparently to install a plugin, often entailing some ongoing monthly expense, and always adding more complexity, hassle, and potential failure points, all of which one shouldn’t need experience running a website to know is a Bad Idea. In the end, plugins were kept to an absolute minimum by employing PHP and CSS code snippets instead, which were initially scrounged from dark corners and begged from Reddit, until Claude was recruited instead to solve all these issues far more efficiently – countless hours could have been saved if this approach had been chosen from the outset, so here it is as a recommendation for anyone in similar circumstances.