Does Casio's New Calculator Watch Take You Back To 6th Grade Math Class? (techspot.com) 78
Slashdot reader jjslash brings word that Casio "has reintroduced its iconic calculator watch featuring a retro design with green text on a negative LCD and a classic keypad layout."
TechSpot reports that the watch was based on the Casio Mini personal calculator first released in the early 1970s — even offering a keypad using the original fonts (with numbers separated by grid lines): Even the mode button, colored red, is a nod to the calculator's power indicator. The watches' calculator function can add, subtract, multiply, and divide up to eight digits. As for watch functions, you get dual time, an alarm, stopwatch functionality, and more...
Casio's original personal calculator debuted in 1972, and cost $59.95. It featured a six-digit display, was a quarter the size of its competitors, and cost just a third of rival products. The calculator was an instant hit for Casio, selling a million units in the first 10 months on the market and more than six million units over the span of the series.
Long-time Slashdot reader antdude says "I still wear one! Casio Data Bank 150 model...!"
Share your own vintage calculator memories in the comments...
TechSpot reports that the watch was based on the Casio Mini personal calculator first released in the early 1970s — even offering a keypad using the original fonts (with numbers separated by grid lines): Even the mode button, colored red, is a nod to the calculator's power indicator. The watches' calculator function can add, subtract, multiply, and divide up to eight digits. As for watch functions, you get dual time, an alarm, stopwatch functionality, and more...
Casio's original personal calculator debuted in 1972, and cost $59.95. It featured a six-digit display, was a quarter the size of its competitors, and cost just a third of rival products. The calculator was an instant hit for Casio, selling a million units in the first 10 months on the market and more than six million units over the span of the series.
Long-time Slashdot reader antdude says "I still wear one! Casio Data Bank 150 model...!"
Share your own vintage calculator memories in the comments...
Do young people still use watches? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do young people still use watches?
I thought the cellphone was the new watch.
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Do young people still use watches?
I thought the cellphone was the new watch.
Yes, they do. However, they are more fashion accessories now. They are large and "blingy". I hate them. My Go To watch now is a Casio MRW-200H ( https://www.casio.com/us/watch... [casio.com] )
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I prefer the MDV106, which is a little less busy and a lot more rugged. Speaking of not busy, I like the $15 MQ24 [amazon.com], which reminds me of Steve Jobs favored Seiko 6431-6030, which will set you back over $700 in good condition.
One of the things Jobs understood is the less functions you cram onto something, the easier it is for the design to be good. There was a reason for "tool watches" like dive watches or the auto racing watches which Apollo astronauts wore, but that reason doesn't exist anymore. A watch t
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absolutely (Score:1)
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The Apple Watch reinvigorated the watch market (of all kinds, all price points) like you would not believe.
Certainly Apple did what Apple does, convince their fan-base that a product is fashionable. The year before several companies released smart watches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, a large number of new smartwatches were released from various companies such as Razer Inc. Archos, Some called the show a "wrist revolution".
That show happened in Jan 2014, nearly 9 months later, Apple announces they're developing a smart watch (with a release date in early 2015). No doubt to keep from being left behind.
Who released significant new smart watches the year before Apple launched theirs? Razer, LG, Samsung, Motorola and others.
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I bought a high end one once.. I gave it to my father.
Terrible watch.. I much prefer the cheaper / better fitbit.
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The watch is a fashion accessory nothing more. It was never about telling time. Time is free, you can ask virtually anyone for it or get it from anywhere.
Re: Do young people still use watches? (Score:3)
Time is free, you can ask virtually anyone for it or get it from anywhere.
Let's think about that - "I don't need to wear a watch because I can always ask someone that has a watch what time it is!"
But I will say, I stopped wearing a watch some 30 years ago, and I quickly learned how ubiquitous clocks really are. I soon discovered I was checking the time subconsciously, most frequently off the 'programmable thermostats' around my office.
I soon developed a better sense of time, and I could get pretty accurate estimating the passage of time (and the significance of the passage of tim [youtube.com]
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That's not what I said. I said you can get time virtually from anywhere and literally mentioned that I had the time in front of me in multiple places without relying on my watch.
At any point in the street you'll find the time all over the place. Even in a world without watches everyone has a phone, some buildings have the time on them, in any modern city every bus / tram stop will display the time, most shops will have the time in there somewhere (look in the window you're bound to see a clock).
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> programmable thermostats' around my office
Wow, here, in fact in all the places I have worked, those are the least trustworthy sources!
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> Time is free, you can ask virtually anyone for it or get it from anywhere
If you ask me for the time and I dont know you I'l probably only going to be bothered giving you it to the nearest quarter hour :D
But, who are you going to ask for the time when you are all by yourself? The sheep in the feild? The parked cars?
Re: Do young people still use watches? (Score:5, Funny)
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Gets even worse if you have a phone that refuses or fails to get the time from the network, then suffers from an insane clock drift.
This was an issue I had with a faulty apple phone and windows phones.
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You're right about that!
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it's quicker to turn my wrist than pull out my phone, especially while driving.
...but why would you need a watch while driving? Most cars have in internal display clock built in somewhere on the car dashboard.
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Because the car's clock slowly drifts out of sync from atomic time and I'm too lazy to keep resynchronizing it, also it doesn't show the date.
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If you forget what the date is while driving you have more problems than a watch can solve. 8^)
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Knowing the date is handy if I get something that says "Check us out on November 23". Well, I don't know today's date as it generally isn't something I keep top of mind. Knowing the day, and say, I have an appointment next Thursday is what I keep track of. Not the actual date.
So then I need to put November 23 into context - is that this week, is it next week, what day is it? But I don't know what today's date is w
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> If you forget what the date is while driving
Most people dont know the date when they leave for work. They know what day it is, but not what the date is. While driving you suddenly remember you actually do have an appointment on the 23rd of nov, only is that today? Did you think it was tuesday but got mixed up as you had a 3 day weekend that borked your sense of time?
When was so and so's birthday again? The 10th? Is that tomorrow? Wait, what? It's TODAY? Crap, now I know where I'm off to at lunch
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Well the car is just one example, I'd always use the car clock as looking at the wrist while driving takes your eyes (not to mention the hand) away from the road/wheel way too long, the dashboard clock/radio clock at least keeps the road closer to your line of sight. But the same action also works when on a bike, which obviously has no clock, an e-scooter, again has no clock unless you use one of those that let you clip your smartphone precariously on the handlebars.
In a new car however you will "miss" the
Re: Do young people still use watches? (Score:2)
Your car doesn't have a clock on the dashboard? Really?
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My old car had no clock unless I had the GPS screen on. It was the dumbest design. I usually preferred to have it off, especially at night.
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> Your car doesn't have a clock on the dashboard? Really?
My car doesnt. It is displayed on the Sync radio screen, but only in certain circumstances. When the radio is off, no clock. When the radio is displaying a persistant notification, again, no clock.
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Sure, they wear a smart watch or fitness band. I wear the latter (Xiaomi Mi Band 6) and it's actually quite insightful.
I assume you can get a calculator app for the watches, although I never really understand why you would want one.
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For HR I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seems like it gives a reasonable indication. It gets low when I'm in bed, it gets high when I'm exercising. That is enough for my needs, e.g. calorie burn estimation (which it also provides). Step counting is pretty good, within 1% when I've measured it over 1000 paces.
Battery life with HR measurement every 5 minutes is a solid 2 weeks.
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Resting heart rate is different depending on your age, BMI etc. 102 is pretty high as it should be about 80 or so, mine with my higher BMI can be around 90-100 when resting which indicates I need to loose the fat.
I can go as low as the 70's when asleep.
When exercising I will go 120 or above depending what I'm doing.
If you need to test the accuracy you should use a properly calibrated device, see a doctor and get them to do it. The wrist devices can be affected by "arm scum" that they collect if you dont c
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In my experience I had most trouble with fitbits and other lighter fitness trackers.
Currently I use a Samsung Gear S3 which when compared to most of my other non-smart watches, mechanical and quarts is a giant. It's quite heavy so anything beneath it is getting crushed up against the skin, plus it's tight as I wear watches tight.
I think it also depends on the sensor, I expect the S3 has a coating on the sensor area that helps avoid dirt etc. I havnt had to clean it as much as other devices or normal watch
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Do young people still use watches?
Yeah. I have to use a long PIN on my phone plus a biometric (fingerprint or face) because of requirements at my work. Kind of a hassle when all I want to know is if I have time before the next meeting or if I'm going to make the next shuttle.
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If they do, they're fancy "smart watches". I'm wearing one that was about $45. Unfortunately it doesn't have all the features of the cheaper ones I've used. I bought a couple for around $20 too. I had a telehealth appointment with a doctor and when asked if I had anything to take my BP with I mentioned one of those cheap watches - and how unsure I was if it could be trusted and the doctor told me not to bother. Sometimes it seemed accurate, but I wouldn't trust it for health purposes. Maybe if I had spent
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> Do young people still use watches?
Since the smart watch became a thing, yes.
> I thought the cellphone was the new watch.
It makes for a poor and inconvenient watch, which is why the young people I know just use their smart watches. They even dont use the smartphone to pay contactless, not when the watch does that.
Little kids dont get smartphones, they start with watches. I know 2 nieces of mine (5 and 3) who are crazy about spiderman and they love any chance to pretend they are wearing a spidey watc
DUNNO (Score:4, Funny)
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does it say b00bs?
The only reason anyone knows 1337: it's the gateway to upside-down 5318008.
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You mean you don't know that pi times 1337 ~= 42*100
1337 is over 100x the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
The Hundreds Year War also started in 1337 AD.
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This Brings me Back to the mid 1980's (Score:5, Interesting)
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When I was at UCLA, calculators were prohibited in chemistry exams. Slide rules were allowed, and I believe that the exam pages had a log table either as an extra page, or printed on the back side. Here is a (ahem) National Museum of American History page showing what I used: Pickett N500-ES [si.edu] The nitric odor in Young Hall usually but not always exceeded that of the Los Angeles air.
When I was late teens age I picked up a Wyle WS-02 desk calculator at a surplus store. It was a masterpiece of barely feasible
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In high school in the late '70s in my chemistry class the teacher had a race between the rich kid with the calculator and myself with my second-hand slide rule. I was about half a second faster, but if he weren't a one-finger keyboarder I don't know who would have won.
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A couple of years ago I picked up a Sharp EL-5100. The screen has sunburn but you can buy replacement LCDs. It wasn't too hard to fit the new LCD, used some UV glue to to attach the plastic cover without any bubbles. The PCB need a bit of cleaning and solder mask replacement where the batteries had leaked.
It's a great calculator, and the slide action on the case is immensely satisfying. I'm happy to have fixed it too, saved from landfill.
Older calculators were expensive and as such were often made of nicer
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Same year, one my most cherished gifts is from my sister. She was a rare bird as a female in computer engineering. I was fascinated by her HP-15C calculator. She gave me one for Christmas. I still have that calculator and its quality is unparalleled. I was in high school at the time. It went with me to undergrad and grad. I don't use it much but I still have it safely in a desk drawer and poke around at it occasionally. I marvelled when it could solve basic integrals. In almost 40 years, it has only needed
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Definitely.
It was not my first calculator, but for my 21st birthday I got a Casio FX21 from my father, in 1987. I still use it, I still have the manual, it runs five years on a single CR2032 battery. It's not CAS, but I think that it is a nice example that one's batteries do not need to run down in a week or two (looking at you TI).
RPN for the win (Score:5, Interesting)
My first calculator was an HP35
and we weren't allowed to use calculators in (external) exams, we had to use log tables.
Re: RPN for the win (Score:4, Funny)
I hate log tables. Too bumpy. Really should plane them down to boards.
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No. PP is probably thinking about something like the Alaska Highway [pbs.org]. Also known as corduroy roads.
They were cool for about a week (Score:5, Interesting)
And then you came to the realization that the buttons are small and awkward to push, and immobilizing your watch hand while you push the buttons with your other hand is less good than just pushing buttons on a pocket calculator.
By the time I went through gradeschool in the 90s, they'd given up on the "calculators dull the mind" dogma and handed out school-approved calculators for math class. There were still arithmetic drills, of course. But after the obligatory speed test at the start of math class, in which Mrs H would hand out mimeographed sheets, face down, containing 30 arithmetic problems, say "Go!" and give a special sticker to whoever go the most right in 90 seconds, she would hand out the calculators and proceed to the real meat of the curriculum where mathematical reasoning was the objective and arithmetic accuracy was important but also incidental.
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By the time I went through gradeschool in the 90s, they'd given up on the "calculators dull the mind" dogma ..
Your text below seems to indicate otherwise. The drills you mention are precisely designed to offset the negative effects of going 100% calculator.
... and handed out school-approved calculators for math class. There were still arithmetic drills, of course. But after the obligatory speed test at the start of math class, in which Mrs H would hand out mimeographed sheets, face down, containing 30 arithmetic problems, say "Go!" and give a special sticker to whoever go the most right in 90 seconds, she would hand out the calculators and proceed to the real meat of the curriculum where mathematical reasoning was the objective and arithmetic accuracy was important but also incidental.
Calculators had become an established tool. Students needed to learn how to use them too. However the drills avoided a phenomena called equipment dependency.
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Look at the username. He honestly believes that learning arithmetic is pointless in the age of inexpensive electronic calculators. He'd forget his own name if his mother hadn't written it in magic marker on the waste band of his underwear.
I've seen what happens when students don't drill their multiplication tables and it isn't pretty. Kids with parents who drilled them anyway have a significant advantage in math and science. It shows up as early as long division, but really becomes apparent when they st
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I've seen calculator addict students in tears when they realized how much multiplication and addition is required to solve a 3 x 3 system of linear equations. That is a complete nightmare to do if you need a calculator for every operation. And yeah, basic stuff like simplifying radicals (which requires splitting into the product of a perfect square and square free number, or making a factor tree) or factor by grouping (spotting factors that add to a number, multiply to another number) are all awful without
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'Equipment Dependency' also describes why the majority of people under 50 can't find an address without using GPS.
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also describes why the majority of people under 50 can't find an address without using GPS.
Old man yells at cloud.
Smartphones only really overtook dumbphones in the very early 2010s. That means until 14 years ago the majority of people were still navigating the old fashioned way with maps. I'm comfortably under 50 and I didn't get a smartphone until my early 30s.
But also... why does "technology dependence" matter? It's not like the majority of people over 50 know how to ride a horse a long distance, instead
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why does "technology dependence" matter?
In general it means being able to perform a necessary task if your equipment fails, falling back to paper and pencil if a calculator's batter goes dead. Using a paper map if your GPS fails (hikers print out paper just in case(*), delivery drivers have an old Thomas Bros just in case, etc).
Also, frankly, a lot of old farts were astonishingly bad at actually using maps. This was a thing.
Young people who have been called Second Lieutenant, or something comparable, have been notoriously bad at maps for millennia.
(*) A grad school buddy was in scouts as a kid, when
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'Equipment Dependency' also describes why the majority of people under 50 can't find an address without using GPS.
Doing some math without a calculator is a more commonly used skill in the workplace than land navigation with a paper map. One has to prioritize.
FWIW, my public school taught us to read a map too. We even learned how to make and read topographical maps. That topo stuff was in science class.
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Cool, I'm impressed. Our public school in the 1970s didn't even teach making a budget outside of Home Economics.
My wife worked at Target for (too many) years, at first when the cash register system went down all the older cashiers would stay open and the young ones would get sent somewhere else because they couldn't make change. Now the store just closes.
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Cool, I'm impressed. Our public school in the 1970s didn't even teach making a budget outside of Home Economics.
It may have been the luck of the draw, our 9th grade science teacher. The book mentioned topographical maps among other map types. Topographical being a hard concept for many, I think our teacher may have improvised on her own. She brought in some clear plastic shoe boxes with lids, and some mountainous terrain pieces from a toy railroad kit. Put "mountain" in shoe box. Fill shoe box to 1/4 with water. Put lid on and trace the water line from the top perspective (the lid). Repeat at 1/2 and 3/4 full. Doing
Too bad it doesn't come with digital invaders (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the Casio watches back then had a game on it called digital invaders where numbers would "invade" from the right, and you had to match the numbers streaming in to destroy them. There is a standalone version on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
I've also seen other versions on the web... There may be an iOS version as well.
Anyways, those watches were highly prized as they could provide much needed always available boredom relief back before cell phone games. I'm surprised that casino's current models (or this one) do not host the game. It would be a trivial cost and effort to add it on with today's technology.
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> they could provide much needed always available boredom relief
Never heard of that feature, probably as having such a calculator in exams was a no-go. Had to use the school sanctioned one.
I used to pass the time after I finished the exam using it do p[lay with binary arithmatic and a personal fave, calculate the distance between Jupiter and earth based on the speed of light.
Available now (Score:1)
Remake this one (Score:2)
I still wear a 1983 Casio CFX-200 scientific calculator watch, with a chrome case. People who see it often comment on it.
It does all the things you'd expect of a scientific calculator.
Unfortunately I cracked the crystal, and you can't get it replaced.
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Agreed. Those sell on eBay nowadays for as much as $650, so there is clearly some demand for them.
Shame on Casio Quality Control (Score:2)
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> I also guess the 'Quartz' face is plastic too
Since when did cheap Casio watches like these have anything other than a plastic face?
Sixth-grade Math Class? (Score:1)
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We did in 1974 in Michigan. Separate classes for English, Science and Math, and everything else was Home Room.
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> was only one class for all subjects
Wow
You should have gone to school in the UK in the 80's/90's. We had a timetable of what lessons you did on what days when and where and with who.
6th Grade Math Class? (Score:3)
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No (Score:2)
I still wear one! (Score:2)
Casio Data Bank 150. I have been wearing these calculator watches since high school. :)
HP-67 then HP-41C (Score:1)
Smart watches of our time (Score:2)
These and other oddball watches were the smartwatches of our time back then.
I had several weird watches like the Seiko Data 2000, Casio Phone dialer watch, One that could talk, and several with compass and barometer built in. It's too many to remember, but I do remember I used them like a statement, just to have something curious and be the "odd-one-out" with all the tech, it was on purpose.
When the smartphones came along, the watches had outlived their attraction value for me, and even though I got a smart
Enough with new designs, give it a light (Score:1)
I had the even BETTER version (Score:1)