My idea of an iWatch…

In an age of iWatches, I decided to go back to my first love.

Calculator watches were cool.

Yeah, this dates me like crazy, but you gotta remember what the 80s were like. Home computers were just becoming a thing. In time I would get a Vic20 and later a Commodore 64. The idea of technology in the home made anything seem possible. It was infectious.

One example, in 1987, the movie Dragnet came out, with Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks. At one point Tom Hanks pulls out his TV watch.

A TV… on a watch.

That was amazing. Sure, it was only 1 inch and black and white, but the fact it was even possible stunned me. Around the same time, I saw portable stereos (aka Boom Boxes, aka Ghetto Blasters) that had a small TV built into them.

I grew up poor, though. Stuff like that was not in my reach. A calculator watch, though? Well, that’s almost a computer, and it can help with school, and they’d been around since the 70s, so by this point they weren’t too expensive.

There was just one problem with them. The rubbery plastic watch strap would start to irritate me after a day or so. 

This wasn’t an allergic reaction per se. More like a physical effect, chaffing due to trapped sweat not being able to escape. 

When I decided to get one for kicks last year, the same model as I used to have, I didn’t expect that strap to also be exactly the same as well. After a few days, I took it off.

So it just sat around unused. I’d put it on once in a while, only to be reminded of why I stopped.  

Then the strap broke, not from force but just falling apart. You know how some plastics turn super brittle over time? That. But that got me to think I could just replace the strap with something better. Something I could also remove and re-use on a better watch in the future (maybe a nice self-winding analog watch). 

So I got a breathable, light metal mesh strap for the calculator watch, and haven’t had a problem since. It’s got a weird way of locking, though… you have to slip it underneath itself before locking it into place (instead of over like most), which looks elegant, but makes it difficult to get a snug fit on.