6/19/2023 Question of the day

[petrea_mitchell]

Watch Day: Do you still wear a watch (assuming you ever did wear one)? Is it just a regular time telling watch, or is a smartwatch or fitness/health device that also tells you the time?

I stopped wearing watches when I started carrying around pocket-sized devices that could tell me what time it is (and commented at some point that technology had advanced as far as reinventing the pocketwatch).

Comments

[delosharriman]

I typically carry a pocket watch, but a somewhat unusual one. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a brief popularity of “electronic” watches, that is to say, mechanical watches driven by electricity. These typically have one transistor in them, used as a switch. I was greatly amused to be eating lunch in a Google office, and reflecting on the difference of nine-or-so orders of magnitude in the number of transistors I was carrying, and the number carried by the people around me with their mobile devices.