Seiko Originals: The UC-2000, A Smartwatch from 1984

This watch is actually capable of running custom software and there was a single cartridge of software available for it at launch. No other software was ever made for it until 2017 when a developer reverse engineered the whole thing:

https://github.com/azya52/seiko

https://www.hackster.io/news/reverse-engineering-the-world-s...

Everything about the watch had to be figured out from scratch from the communications protocol to the CPU instructions. It's pretty cool to see a device from 1984 actually getting some "new life" in this way.

> Imagine a smart watch, but from 1984. That sounds like something straight out of a scifi film since the 80s is not exactly known for great advances in personal computing.

Now that's a ridiculous statement, especially when you're specifically talking about the year 1984...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc

Slightly off topic but Seiko is probably my favorite watch brand period. It's hard to describe exactly why but if you look at other brands like say Rolex, Omega, Tag, etc, a big part of why people buy those is the prestige of that watch. Seiko on the other hand has virtually none of that prestige and you buy it simply because it's a freaking great watch. And with their sub-brand of Grand Seiko, you feel like you're in a special club wearing one of those because almost no one outside of watch people know what a GS is and even spending thousands you still feel like you pay for the technology (spring drive) versus just the prestige of "Grand Seiko". And they also make fantastic watches at the lower end, my first mechanical watch was a Seiko 5 which I got for ~$60. I've since given that one away to someone who got into watch collecting and I always recommend the Seiko 5 to anyone trying to get into watches.

My grandfather was a watchmaker and jeweler. He worked on mechanical watches ranging from the everyday to moderately high end. Despite this, he was as into gizmosity as you could possibly get.

He had a Casio Databank and would talk about how it was a calculator and could store phone numbers. The buttons on that thing were microscopic, and I can't imagine how it was actually worth the effort to program phone numbers into it or use it as a calculator. Nonetheless, he did. When the strap lugs broke, he fixed them with JB Weld. He usually had on two or three watches at any given time: his own, a customer's watch that he was testing after a repair, and that damned Casio, grey JB Weld and all.

I'm absolutely astonished that he didn't own one of these. It would have been right up his alley. If he was still alive, I'd call him and ask him about this. For that matter, I'd have loved to hear his take on the Apple Watch as well.

From a couple of years earlier, the Seiko TV watch (yes, wristwatch you could watch TV on):

https://www.ablogtowatch.com/no-longer-made-seiko-tv-watch-f...

Damn I wish Japan was still making cool tech, I loved their Aesthetic

Semi off-topic, but this site has auto-translate on. And reading an automatic translation of something without knowing, I will quite easily get the impression that the site authors are careless morons.

Have auto translate switched off if you value those visitors who actually read stuff, even if the metrics give it a 20% advantage.

> That sounds like something straight out of a scifi film since the 80s is not exactly known for great advances in personal computing.

That is jaw-droppingly ignorant. That's the decade that gave us the IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, ... the rise of online bulletin boards (BBSes). Communication speeds in consumer equipment going from 300 bps to past 9600. Graphics resolutions rising. Quality audio becoming available: from speakers connected to GPIO lines for square wave toggling, to 16 bit stereo samples at 44+ kHz sampling rates. Memory sizes, complexity of applications, ... games! Mass storage: from floppies to tiny hard disks (like the IBM PC/XT's 10 megger), to much larger disks. Home printing: dot matrix/daisywheel to laser. HP LaserJet: 1984; Apple LaserWriter: 1985.

> During the dawn of the computing age, western companies focused on making their hardware more powerful and more complex. This is how you got massive computers - it didn’t matter how big a computer became as long as it was more powerful than the last.

erm no, thats not true at all.

I sold one of these on eBay a while back, I bought it new in the 80s and only got it to work as expected once. The person I sold it too was able to get it working and said they are having a blast with it.