r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Sharp-potential7935 • 1d ago
This 1983 Casio watch was truly ahead of its time
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u/CallingTomServo 1d ago
I, an idiot who doesn’t pay attention, sat here thinking for a minute “wait, they didn’t draw a 4”
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u/Kadgrin 1d ago
you're not alone
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u/Kind_Resort_9535 1d ago
What did he draw I’m at a loss
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u/wannabe_inuit 1d ago
1+3=
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u/Fauster 1d ago
Finally! Now I don't have to carry addition tables around!
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u/Inertbert 1d ago
Someday we will have the technology for a wrist mounted abacus.
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u/Suspicious_Glove_900 1d ago
The problem right now is the abacus is too bulky, so we're stuck using these stupid digital calculators. But one day...
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u/Nina-Ninja123 1d ago
Why can’t I switch my digital calculator to the abacus style? It’s so hard to read with these Arabic numerals. Just give me simple beads on a stick please
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u/wittyrandomusername 1d ago
At first I thought they were touching the number on the clock to make it show up. But then I saw their finger move, and I was wondering how it knew which number they were touching. I too am an idiot, just a different kind of idiot.
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u/PrimaLumiere_A1M 1d ago
Any idea how did it function?
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u/Deutscher_Bub 1d ago edited 1d ago
Touch controls were already a thing back then, really old pcs actually even had some experimental touchscreen versions, just the screen behind the touch and the responsiveness of todays smartphones wasn't a thing.
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u/artistic_programmer 1d ago
i think old touch based tech used to be based on pressure instead of conduction (thats why you see some old folks use touch screens like it owes them money) but not sure if thats what's being used here
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Uhmerikan 1d ago
I don’t know whether all the old folks are gambling or not but most pressure conduction tech would eventually begin to fail leading to harder presses and subsequently even more failures.
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u/ScreamSmart 1d ago
Phones between 2000 and 2010 which had some form of touch screen had resistive touch screens. So you either pushed your finger in, dragged a plastic stylus or used your nail to use them. So that might also be the reason.
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u/Nanerpoodin 1d ago
That and those Megatouch video games they had in bars in the 90s.
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u/SlowThePath 1d ago
Shit I played a ton of photo hunt around 2010. Only game we played on that thing but it was actually a ton of fun when you play together in pairs.
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u/NekoArtemis 1d ago
Or the ATM. That was definitely the most common touch screen device when I was a kid.
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u/porn_sub_lurker 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah that's pretty much right. They're called "resistive touch" panels. They're essentially two conductive sheets with a tiny separation. You put a voltage at one end and it drops as it travels over the sheet. And you essentially short it out with the other sheet by pushing them together. So if one side of a sheet is 5V and the other is 0V and the place you're reading says 2.5V then you're touching halfway up the sheet. Each sheet has a ground and a high voltage. One of them is for the X direction, the other for the Y direction. And they are checked sequentially. So when the X-direction plate is powered, you read it with the Y direction plate, and vice versa. But it happens so fast that it appears to happen simultaneously. Reading both gives you the X,Y coordinate.
The touchscreen on your phone is a "capacitive touch" which conducts electricity, like you said. That's why when you're wearing a glove or touch it with a non-conducting surface it doesn't work. Or if you get water on it it might conduct randomly as it bridges different connections. They're much more reliable though. They also use less power because you don't have to hold a consistent high voltage on the plates. I don't know too much more about how capacitive touchscreens work though. I've never actually used one aside from on my phone.
Edit: also, as far as the software, I'm not really sure. I know that lots of people have been working on machine learning algorithms for decades. The MNIST dataset was created in the early 90s for that purpose. It's tens of thousands of variations of the digits 0-9 and it was made for the purpose of identifying hand written numbers, like on the watch. ML algorithms like K nearest neighbors have existed for decades before that.
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u/Not_Here_Senpai 1d ago
You covered 2 of the touchscreen technologies, but you missed the third. Infrared is pretty commonly used in interactive displays like monitors and TVs. There's a frame raised just above the display surface overlaying an IR grid. As the IR beams are interrupted, they use the X & Y of the interrupted beams to track touch. It's pretty sophisticated, higher-end IR displays support up to 40 simultaneous touches.
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u/porn_sub_lurker 1d ago
Right on, thanks. I actually didn't know about that one. I guess I should also add that a resistive touchscreen can only register a single touch at a time since any touch beyond the short circuit would be ignored.
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u/zehamberglar 1d ago
This comment made me feel really fucking old. I know this seems like ancient history to you, but the switch from resistive to capacitive touch screens in the mainstream was an innovation mainly driven by the iphone, less than 20 years ago. There are people in their late 20s that probably remember this happening.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 1d ago
The little circles are light receptors I think. Why people need to beat their touch screens is always interesting though. Maybe less sharp fine motor control? Or fingers are less sensitive to haptic feedback?
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u/ryantheskitzo 1d ago
Yes much of the older touch screens were pressure sensitive instead of conductive. Prime example would be the Nintendo DS. You could use anything as a stylus. Pens, pencils, twigs, coins, literally anything. Now my stupid iPad needs its own stupid pencil that doesn't work with any other device.
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u/VancouverStickerCo 1d ago edited 14h ago
Ha!
Late model Gen-exer here.
it goes back to before screens.
Credit cards used to use transfer paper. you had to dominate that credit card slip into submission to get your signature to push through.
Early touch screens needed a bit of pressure, but nowhere near what people were trained by visa and mastercard to use over the course of twenty years or so. I used to service one of the really old ones, and people would just naturally apply the amount of pressure they'd been applying to transfer paper, and broke a lot of screens in the process.
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u/Norwegian_Plumber 1d ago
Here's a semi-relevant technology connections video. It's not as advanced as this watch but is pretty neat: https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw
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u/EduinBrutus 1d ago
Can i get a relevant video through the magic of watching two semi-relevant ones?
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u/SeedFoundation 1d ago
To add on further how this worked (probably worked) is that it had very primitive sensors, 9 laid out in a 8 shaped would be enough to detect if you drew any mathematical symbols including numbers 0-9.
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u/phire 1d ago
Yeah, grid-based handwriting recognition was a prominent idea in the 60s, and this looks like it.
The advantage is you can run the recognition algorithm with basically zero CPU power, like here where it's most likely a tiny 4-bit microcontroller running for over a year off a single watch battery. There is only one valid set of touch cells for every number/symbol.
The disadvantage... it's super clunky. Requires the human to adjust their "handwriting" to match what the computer would accept.
In the 60s, this research was originally about providing way for humans to interact with computers, without needing to learn how to type; Because at the time, typing was considered to be a specialist skill most used secretaries and dedicated typists.
Turns out it was far easier and productive for everyone to just learn how to type.2
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u/jimkelly 1d ago
Man that isn't the important part. It's how did it compute and translate the drawings into a calculator and fit in a watch form that's impressive for 1983.
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u/genetichazzard 1d ago
Capacitive touch screens have been a thing since the mid 1960's. So almost 20 years after its time.
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u/_QXZ 1d ago
Yeah but handwriting recognition was unheard of. We use AI for it now, not sure what kind of clever trickery they used
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u/cjsv7657 1d ago
The screen probably only has 9 touch zones which is all that is needed for basic math. It would be pretty easy to program. Straight line in the middle = 1. You just match the 3x3 array. It isn't really handwriting recognition. I did something similar in high school programming when we were learning q-basic.
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u/gronkey 1d ago
This is wrong, according to Casio's website's description of the technology...
The originally developed Finger Trace Recognition System (FTRS) provided character recognition architecture that delivered accurate results regardless of factors such as the size of the letters or where characters were traced on the screen.
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u/cjsv7657 1d ago
The manual explicitly states exactly how to draw each character. So it is still probably what I said, just at a higher resolution.
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u/ZeroAmusement 1d ago edited 1d ago
No. "Independently of position and size" suggestions it's not doing simple zone based recognition. Their patent does go into more detail and it is more complex than that.
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u/cjsv7657 1d ago edited 1d ago
Then link the patent. Because patent 4,695,828 sounds pretty much like I said when you read past the abstract.
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u/BFfF3 1d ago
Ohhhh, it's a patent battle y'all!
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u/ZeroAmusement 1d ago
Why do I even need to link the patent? Their description alone "Independently of position and size" is already good reason to believe you are wrong.
What reason is there to think your hunch is right? Is it hard to believe you're wrong, from a hunch about how it works? Why?
But I'll link to patents and point it out anyway. Patent 4,771,268 breaks it down more. It goes into how it vectorizes the strokes, which allows the size and position independence.
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u/Time_Athlete_1156 1d ago
No it actually used a software, some kind of early OCR system. If I find an article from my defunct blogs explaining it, I'll share it here.
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u/postmodest 1d ago
It has more than that, and the weights for a numbers-plus-symbols-only neural net will fit into a very small amount of ROM.
Consider that in 1996, Nikon released a film camera with a kilopixel sensor that was wired to a neural net weighted to recognize a sunset vs a human face, a landscape vs a studio, and it used that to set the exposure in auto-mode.
We get all excited by LLMs that have been fed the stolen creative output of everything, ever, and we've forgotten that for some "AI" machine-learning tasks, it's just a couple arrays of numbers that fit handily into 256Kb.
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u/SinisterCheese 1d ago
In 1960s Perceptron 1 could do binary classification of male and female faces, with 20x20 grid of photosensors.
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u/Otherwise-Sir7359 21h ago
That's still too much. I designed a framework two years ago that allowed training 70,000 MNIST images with 97% accuracy using only 14kB of ROM, or 1 million EMBER 2024 sample files with an AUC of 0.999964 and a model size of 126kB.
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u/ComplicatedAirFlow 1d ago
You are correct, it has 9 zones. I guess it also takes into account lifts and which order they are activated in.
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u/Dyinglightredditfan 1d ago
probably used handwriting recognition based on AI lol... they developed that sometime in the 60's or 70's too if im not mistaken
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u/AintAintAWord 1d ago
Casio was actually using an early version of touchscreen technology back in 1983. The watch had transparent sensors built into the glass that detected changes in electrical capacitance as you moved your finger across it. A tiny processor tracked those movements and recognized numbers and math symbols you drew with your finger. It only needed to recognize about 16 different characters, so it was pretty manageable even with 1980s technology
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u/symb015X 1d ago
Totally random but love your username
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u/Incidion 1d ago
As a Texan I don't. Ain't is formally recognized in pretty much every English dictionary, along with Y'all. I ain't Southern in a lot of ways, but you can pry those words from my cold dead hands.
Also it feels mean. :(
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u/Adventurous-Emu-9345 1d ago edited 1d ago
A transparent touch sensor in the crystal of a watch is still pretty impressive and unique in a 1980s product.
Considering how products from even 20 years ago have struggled with handwriting recognition, that part is also quite impressive.
And all that in such a small package was basically unheard of back then. I remember how clunky even 90s tech was.
Shit, even the regular old calculator Casios seemed like something from the future. A touch screen one would have looked like magic to 80s me.
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u/Time_Traveling_Idiot 1d ago
I guess if you limit it strictly to numbers and a handful of mathematical signs, it shouldn't be too difficult. Also the user would have to be very careful to draw each letter "the correct way". I bet if you drew a 0 from the bottom up (and not starting from the top), it wouldn't work.
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u/FrostyD7 1d ago
My dad bought a PDA ~25 years ago that had very competent character recognition. It's not recognizing entire sentences, just one character at a time. It did a great job even back then, had a whole game designed around doing it quickly to practice your speed and accuracy.
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u/dadbodking 1d ago
Hey man, tomorrow at my place is a party that I need ruined. You available?
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u/tryyeezus 1d ago
Things like this don't become available for public use until 20 years after discovery so make it 40
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u/Ace95Archer 1d ago
Turns 12ms brain calculation into 12 whole seconds fidgeting
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u/nimama3233 1d ago
My thought as well. There’s a small window where it would have been faster to swipe the whole thing out than do it in your head, while also not being so long that you don’t trust the amount of swipes required to input it all knowing something could easily be read wrong and invalidate the whole thing.
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u/Quantaform 1d ago
Counterpoint: It's fucking awesome!
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u/GostBoster 1d ago
Yes, there's this whole angle. Once I was reading some old magazine scans and found that Casio had data storage watches you could hook to a computer, IIRC the one in the ad could store up to 80 "screens" with each screen being two lines of numbers and basic characters that could be rendered in segmented LED, the suggestion you use it to store like phone numbers and little snippets.
Then got the Casio catalog listing their breakthrough hits and with this I had the hindsight notion that at this point Rolex was losing a lot of status, with Casio being the kings of precision, Rolex tried to play the style card and Casio started attacking on all fronts:
You want an utilitarian cheap watch? Get a basic Casio. Wanna go full nerd? Get our wristwatch calculators with built in games and IR/data connection. Wanna full style? Get our pieces that look good with the reliable Casio accuracy. Want to play James Bond? We got a few elegant pieces with some cool gadgets concealed within, and the AT-550 was one of if not the first to fit this criteria: Elegance of a traditional analog piece, the utility of a calculator, and the absolute novelty of doing it without physical face buttons.
This was 100% done for style.
A few notable pieces:
1982 - T-1500 and T-2000 - Built-in Japanese and English basic dictionary
1983 - CFX-2000 - Scientific calculator wristwatch
1983 - TC-500 - Touchscreen calculator buttons
1984 - CD-40 - Start of the Databank line, not listed on the Casio website but at some point they started offering IR and computer communication.
1987 - TM-100 - Built-in radio transmitter
1987 - DBA-80 - Phreak Watch, capable of performing tone autodial on a regular phone
1989 - BM-100-W - Wrist-mounted weather station
1989 - Astronomers clock with planetary orbits including Pluto and the Halley Comet from 1901 to 2200
1992 - Analog face wristwatch which can be opened revealing its digital features and microdot/poison compartment.
Casio cooked HARD while everybody either slept or, in Rolex's case, slept on their laurels.
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u/CornerHugger 1d ago
Right? Seems like a party trick. I can't imagine it's easy to do big numbers like 4726 / 283 or something useful like 145 * 0.15 (for tipping)
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u/ZeroMoneyDown 1d ago
Casio would create a watch that could tell the time in 17 different locations, had a calculator, would tell you the temperature and barometric pressure and could fry an egg and sell it for $24.99.
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u/lianodel 1d ago
Very little exaggeration.
And it keeps me from pulling out my phone to check the time!
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u/GostBoster 1d ago
The only exaggeration I can list is the frying an egg and if you want to be technical about it, some models from the 1987 crop could have been an accessory to making it work. (Hooking a Wallace and Gromit contraption to the autodialer so that it starts frying an egg when dialing a specific number, or activate a frying device through the FM transmitter).
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u/readyToPostpone 1d ago
How did they manage to put saxophone inside back in the times?
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u/tomshark22 1d ago
I worked emergency services at Yokota AB, Japan 1984-88. Doing the math for administering correct medication doses for children/infants was time consuming. In 1985, Casio came out with a 'data bank' wrist watch. I bought one and put in all the pediatric dosing measures based on weights/age and medication. Within 3 days, EVERYONE in the ER had one of these watches. Saved soooo much time when time is soooo important.
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u/GostBoster 1d ago
Interesting, when reading the timeline from both Casio website and old catalogs, it always listed as the most feature rich Casios intended for the Japanese market, a few being a bit gimmicky but the Databank line seemed to be genuinely useful from the start, and I assume because Japanese characters have better information density, these would have been way more useful there, like the DKW-1000 allowing Kanji input.
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u/Kellinghusen18 1d ago
name of the music track?
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u/likamuka 1d ago
If you enjoyed this, you should check out Yom Cosmogonia. Similar style amazing and actually longer than that.
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u/TheEternalPharaoh 1d ago
This is why even today, especially being in the military, I prefer a classic, reliable Casio than any smartwatch or Rolex
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u/nimama3233 1d ago
I agree with this sentiment for sure, but how is this post at all “this is why”
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u/Realmofthehappygod 1d ago
Because he always forgets what 3+1 is
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u/SunsetSpark 1d ago
"this is why" is just a place holder for i like this thing but i want to seem better than you and i pick this reason why its SUPERIOR
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u/mister_spacecat 1d ago
They're making a joke that the military are morons that need to do basic arithmetic on their watch.
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u/spoo4brains 1d ago
A work colleague had one of those back then, I thought it was really cool, this is the first time I have seen it mentioned online!
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u/LawyerDad1981 1d ago
That hotel desk man in Planes, Trains & Automobiles is going to wish he had accepted Del Griffith's offer.
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u/ThatsHowVidu 1d ago
Casio watches are a statement for innovation and reliability. Their casio-f91w watch is still made and preferred in militaries for it's reliability, simplicity, and serviceability. I have a Casio pathfinder 1500 w running for 16+ years. AUtomatically recieves time from atomic clocks, solar charged lithium battery, ABC (altitude, Barometer, Compass), Stop watch, timer, world time, moon phase, tide, alarms. Haven't done anything maintenace wise.
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u/Equiv-2 1d ago
How large can the numbers go? And what sort of calculations?
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u/-MrFozzy- 1d ago
1+3 is the only sum it could do. If you wanted 1+4 you had to get that model, so on and so on.
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u/Skatchbro 1d ago
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
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u/DontShoot_ImJesus 1d ago
Wait until you find out what they do with their global communications network, their "Internet".
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u/Purplebuzz 1d ago
I would say behind. I mean adding two one digit numbers is doable on your fingers. If anything, its regressive.
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u/WastingTimesOnReddit 1d ago
But I can do that math in my head, in a cave, with a box of scraps!
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u/NUTZnBERGERS 1d ago
People before 1983: Boy wouldn't it be nice if we had a way to add single digit numbers on the go
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u/peaceful_pancakes 1d ago
Wrong. The abacus was invented around 2000 BC. The calculator in this post is almost 4,000 years behind.
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u/tjorben123 1d ago
imagine this in a meeting..
"just let me quickly calculate this numbers"
*25 minutes later*
"jerry. are you finished allready? it lunchtime now. hurry bro"
"just gimme a few more seconds"
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u/scoopythebear 1d ago
reminds me of del griffith's "i have a calculator" bit from planes trains and automobiles lmao
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u/exceptionally_humble 22h ago
I mean a had a Casio in about 99’ that was also a calculator and that was the coolest shit ever for me and my nerd friends
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u/Ok_Anteater1141 19h ago
Is this real. I wouldn't think an embedded processor in 1983 would be powerful enough to process this.
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u/ohwhatfollyisman 1d ago
i see what you did there.