King of the Databanks, the mighty VDB-1000 was released in 1991, and features in Casio’s history section on their site. Promising a whole new era of wristwatch functionality, Casio didn’t really follow through on developing this concept to its full potential. The pressure-sensitive touchscreen is shrouded by a large bezel sitting 2mm proud of the screen to guard against accidental touches, which adds a lot of bulk. Furthermore, the 64×32 screen inherently lacks some contrast due to the multiplexing (when the pixels outnumber the LCD’s contacts by some multiple, the pixels are activated in a sequence, and this relies on persistence of vision in the same way that LEDs are dimmed; many watches with such an arrangement feature a ‘contrast’ adjustment which barely helps with this because it’s more of a darkness adjustment), and combined with the layered crystal necessary for this type of touch panel, the visibility of this screen isn’t great. What’s more, it wasn’t even blessed with a light… although to be fair, an incandescent in this thing would’ve been useless unless it chewed a lot of battery, and this beast only gets 18 months out of a CR2016 as it is. Timex wouldn’t release Indiglo for another year, and Casio’s Illuminator EL wouldn’t come along until 1995. The VDB-100/1000 (the 100 was a black one) wasn’t followed up until 1996; the VDB-2000 only had a small dot matrix section and the bottom half of the screen was taken up by eight buttons, had no calculator, calendar, or world time, but nor did it have the multiplexing low contrast, and had an EL backlight; this was basically re-released with less memory as the VDB-101JIM a year or so later, along with one more take on this theme, the VDB-3000. 2/3 of the screen on that one was taken up by calculator buttons, and it could store emails and URLs with the aid of a larger character set including lower case and more special characters… and, aside from some inconsequential variations on those models, that was sadly it for the VDB series. I can’t help imagining what could have been if more effort had been directed to the Databank line; perhaps a far sleeker metal and glass model with a capacitive touchscreen and EL lighting, with Casio’s ancient touchscreen ability of understanding letters and numbers drawn on the screen (the DB-1000, and AT-550, both from 1984)… The low power draw smartwatch didn’t quite get off the ground; the VDB-1000 was the sneak preview of a future which never arrived. This example is in pretty good shape, evidently used but minimal wear for its age, functioning perfectly.

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