For those of you who have not been in the computer industry for thirty years as I have, I will point out that about fifteen years ago (or more) Seiko put out a watch much like this one. It had a BASIC interpreter built into the watch, and when you placed the watch on a combination keyboard/printer you could program the watch in BASIC. You could run the basic programs through the keyboard and get the output off the LCD display, or you could get the output off the thermal printer (using roll paper) which came attached to the keyboard. It came with several games, including "number invaders" (at take-off on "space invaders", but could actually be programmed to have fairly sophisticated programs. If you could do your input and output through the watch's buttons and LCD panel, you did not need the keyboard, which proved that the computer was in the watch, but not in the keyboard. It also taught me to write in short lines of code. :-) I actually owned one of these at one time (I "won" it by sitting through a day's drivel on buying a condominium), but eventually gave it to one of my students who thought it was "neat". I think a lot of people thought it was "neat", but not enough to create a lasting market, and particularly at the price Seiko charged for it. I believe the price was much as it is for this new watch, the difference being that fifteen years ago you could buy a lot more of almost anything (but a computer) than you can today for $359. md (who now feels pretty old) -- ============================================================================= Jon "maddog" Hall Internet:Senior Leader, UNIX Software Group Executive Director, Linux International Digital Equipment Corporation Linux International Mailstop ZK03-2/U15 80 Amherst St. 110 Spit Brook Rd. Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A. Nashua, N.H. 03062-2698 U.S.A. WWW: http://www.unix.digital.com WWW: http://www.li.org Voice: +1.603.884.1341 Voice: +1.603.672.4557 FAX: +1.603.884.6424 Board Member: Uniforum Association Office: ZK03-2/V15 Board Member Elect: USENIX Association
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