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The Inside Word on Wearables and Wearable Technology

You are here: Home / Company News / Smart Watches Old News to Casio

Smart Watches Old News to Casio

September 12, 2013 By Dan Rosenbaum

An early wearable

The idea of wristwatch communication is at least as old as, well, Chester Gould and Dick Tracy. Apple may have taken all the air out of the market with hardly a word and without a product, but the NYTimes points out that until now it’s been the more-or-less-anonymous Casio that’s done most of the grunt work in connected watches.

I remember a Timex Datalink watch from 20 years ago that imported calendar and alarm data from Outlook or some other Microsoft PIM by being held up to flickering lines on a computer monitor. The watch was pretty ungainly and the whole process was kludgy (though thank God it didn’t require a cable). As a first step, though? Pretty hot stuff.

Even that wasn’t utterly new. Someone, a few years previous, put a pager in a wristband, with a metal band that circumnavigated the wrist as the antenna. I don’t remember who, and I don’t remember what it used for a battery. (Comments welcome on this.) Very uncomfortable, but even in the 90s it was more elegant than this.

Last updated by Dan Rosenbaum on September 20, 2013.

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Filed Under: Company News, Fashion, Trends Tagged With: history, wristwear

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