Casio Watches of the 1980s

Last year they made a few minimal versions of the f91w with those labels removed https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.F-91WB-1A...

It really was part of the aesthetics in the 80s. I had a gorgeous red cassette player from Sanyo that had text and lines drawn all over it.

There are a few Casios that have cleaner designs.

Come to think of it, this reminds me of how LLMs fill every empty space in a design with technical jargon that is technically correct but doesn’t serve any purpose. Basically typographic cornice.

I actually love that :)

My A159W is my daily driver. I prefer it to my Apple Watch, which I've pretty much stopped wearing. I am not in a wealth bracket to afford wearing mechanical watches.

My Casio is a cheap watch, kind of quirky, and I love it!

I think it suits me very well.

This was also a thing in the 90s and possibly early 00s, I remember my PC had a bunch of logos and crap written all over it.

Minimalism didn’t really take off until Apple made it fashionable.

I imagine it's because they need to put something on the area around the screen, otherwise it would look weird. Casio do make plainer variants of their watches so you can see what I mean: https://us.firstclasswatches.com/casio-black-382mm-digital-d... . It just kind of looks empty. The F-84W has stuff around the screen but is a bit more understated compared to the F-91W: https://i0.wp.com/centreseconds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/...

Casio is a fashion brand. They have G-shock watches in matte black if that’s what you want

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.GA-2100LXB-1...

They also have entire lines that aren’t G-shock such as their edifice line that are more dress oriented

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/edifice/product.EFV-160D-1A...

Fact is g-shock is their most popular line and they release collabs with streetwear brands all the time. People really like the styling

Thinking about it, even a lot of fancy fashion watch brands seem to do this, “Quartz”, “water resist 20m”, however many jewels. The old Casio watches are a bit worse for it though.

But check out the Casio MQ-24, it’s cheap and cheerful but has a much plainer face.

models like the Casio AE-1200 (Casio Royale) look pretty good if you rub off some of the printing: https://i.imgur.com/q1cpCOS.jpeg compared to stock https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...

granted that requires taking out the face plate and rubbing off the print you want to remove

I saw a newish Subaru this week and there was a thin strip near the left rear light that spelled out “symmetrical AWD”. That gave me a slight chuckle. Same with 16g, Turbo or Platinum or “sea salt”.

If you're Japanese and don't know or interact much with English characters and words it probably looks cool. Similar to how people tattoo random Japanese/Chinese characters on their bodies.

Just looked down at my casio and laughed because it says both "WATER RESIST" and "WR".

I frankly just wish it had a backlight.

lately their gshock and timeless collection watches have become really fashionable.

Turbo, 16V, Electronic Fuel Injection. All over Japanese cars from the 80ties, those were the aesthetics of the time.

Those are part of the charm. Fuck 2020s minimalism

Same, which is why I got the DW-5600BB recently. Lacks features I'd like — no radio sync, no solar, no MIP display, but at least it looks cool and clean. Wish Casio had more such nice looking options.

GW-BX5600 is sooo close to being a perfect watch, but they just had to plaster the watch face with all that text and that ugly solar pattern.

I've been thinking about buying a cheap Apple watch just as a sleep tracker.

And you don't even have to charge them nightly. I kind of want a smartwatch, but not until this is solved.

I wish there was a minimal Casio watch which only had heart rate tracking (with high frequency polling too).

Such a neat idea, great design too.

I wear my A159W not only because it is quirky, but also because it reminds me of my grandfather.

He had the same watch, and the backlight is so horrible. I have fond memories of him holding it up at an angle to check the time.

I only knew him for a few years of my life in early childhood. We'd go on long walks together in the late afternoon. He'd check the time when it started getting dark so we'd be back home in time for dinner!

We used the calculator back in the 80s

If you think about it instead of pulling out your phone to calculate something back then you could use this

Funny what we had to endure before the age of the touchscreen. The buttons were always so mushy, too. I do miss the tactile feel, though.

I had a CFX-400 back in the day and it was much more convenient to use it than to not use it. The option of running newtons method by hand on paper was much more annoying than using the watch. I mostly used trig features IRL.

As you can see by the small text above and below the screen you pushed F1/F2 to select the scientific operation you wanted and then "exe" it. I don't recall how "inv" worked, if you selected sine and then inv to arcsin() it or if you tapped inv as a modal and then "exe" while its inverted.

It really wasn't any harder to use than any calculator watch ever shipped. I imagine no one under age 40 has ever used a calculator watch but they were pretty easy to use, just imagine a basic phone calculator app on your wrist but easier to use tactile because of the keyboard.

Its primary downfall was 1) being very expensive compared to carrying a HP calculator in your pocket 2) the buttons and general construction were extremely delicate, the body was just chrome plated plastic IIRC.

Watches in the 80s were like phones in the 2010s it was assumed you'd only get a couple years use out of them before "having to" replace them due to poor components or style, so there's no reason to ship a long term reliable one. These were not "Rolex" lifetime purchases LOL.

Watch bands were also designed to rapidly fail, kind of like fitness bands today.

Watches in the 80s were a very consumerist hobby. Consumerism changes the individual items but the pattern never changes.

Extreme sensor watches were similar to extreme calculator watches but in the 90s. I had a DPX-500, very nice. The barometer drifted too much to be usable. The compass worked very well. As an "outdoor" watch it was fairly durable, rather like desk workers buying "offroad" SUVs that are never driven offroad as the only way to buy a reliable car.

My uninformed guess is: that makes their section of the watch store take up more space, making a customer think: "so many casios, i don't even need to look at the other brands"

Most people who wear watches buy one watch and wear it for 5-10 years, owning more than 3 (casual, dress, cheap durable one for manual labor) is highly unusual. So people tend to be very picky about fashion/style/colors, more so than something like a shirt or shoes that get cycled out regularly. Also have to factor in different wrist sizes.

Wristwatches are sort of unique in that they are technology that you literally wear, so it's important that they look and work exactly how you want.

A decent number of "gotta have them all" fans/whales?

https://shockbase.org/watches/stats.php

Watches: 6670

A cheap quartz watch from Japan and later Hong Kong was more accurate than a 5k handmade Swiss mechanical watch.

Remember that the 1980s was a time when people still needed a watch for PRACTICAL purposes- they needed to tell time. Which a digital watch does so perfectly that you can use it for celestial navigation. And without any maintenance.

Chips. Tiny batteries. Mass production. The Oriental black magic of the eighties.

Okay, AI found it for me. I can’t believe they didn’t add it to that page:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6ae62084ab4081918e5fa21a4ec916a2

The founder announced a week ago you'll soon be able to write custom apps using JS, and released an emulator to begin testing. Too bad you need an account on their app to use history features like step count etc, it's all sent to their firebase and no storage in the app. I hope the Gadgetbridge implementation will be complete someday.

I can totally relate. The quality of Japanese-made products is incredible and that's as true today as it was back then, for the most part. Especially woodworking tools like chisels and saws are outstanding. And I don't just mean the expensive, handmade ones. Even the mass-produced tools feel years ahead of their Western counterparts.

Casio watches especially gschock really feel like they solved the goal of watches. Let people know the time accurately and cheaply.

I have a few “dress” watches I’ll wear to weddings and my smartwatch which is nice for the gym and general. But I still have a gshock I keep around for traveling or when I just want something that will work.

The idea you can toss it in a bag or throw it on and it will just tell you time accurately without worrying about it dying or having to maintain it is still incredible.

I really loved your comment, it's something that we take for granted these days with it being easy to buy these things.

For me I've been collecting (mechanical) watches for 20ish years. Half my collection is high-end Swiss watches, and the other half is more ecclectic but I have a real soft spot for the former Soviet designs.

They were not expensive, and even now you get a great watch for €50 because they made so many of them.

Although the focus of the USSR watches wasn't that level of quality you see in the Japanese pieces they're so rugged and simple that most of them will outlive me.

I regularly buy 50+ year old watches that have never been serviced and still run properly. Obviously there's some element of survivorship bias at play, but the engineering there is top-notch.

> These weren't merely consumer products. They were milestones. They represented years of hard work, sacrifice, aspiration, and the dignity of finally being able to afford something that was genuinely well made. Something that would last. Something that could be passed down.

That’s basically what Rolex and other Swiss watchmakers say about their products.

> No fluff, no marketing that bordered on propaganda

Your comment sounds a lot like propaganda to me.

> ... devices are treated as disposable, depreciating products.

I would argue that this shift really happened in the last 30 to 40 years. We can say it started earlier, but that wasn't true of the majority of goods until around then. Things became "disposable" when the functional innards were reduced to a blob IC. LED lighting taking over pushed it even further.

> Japanese consumer technology meant something incredibly precious to people in underdeveloped and developing nations.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this. I grew up pretty damn broke (like unreliable water kind of broke). Perhaps not as broke as you're describing, but there has always been some bittersweet resentment in the back of people's minds this whole time too. Casio watches are the poster child for exactly the decline you claim to be concerned about. Older people I grew up around were not so materialistic.

Yes, they are stylish in a very cool and functional way that deserves more credit. It's a very ethically justified and postmodern-inspired genre of design. It's like jazz. It's fantastically free of dogmas and tropes. People can fearlessly contribute their own cultural perspectives and elevate everyone's taste in the process. Let's keep it that way, by not hugging it to death.

> There is a beauty and a tragedy in those vintage Japanese watches.

Yes, exactly. That's the tragedy. We finally got what we wanted since the beginning of human history, but at what cost?

> These weren't merely consumer products. They were milestones.

Right. Thanks, ChadGPT.

I collect watches and the only digital watch I've owned for the past 20ish years is the ubiquitous F91W.

I've been strongly tempted by the g-shocks over the years, but never quite pulled the trigger. There are so many to choose from, with various features. But seeing this post I figured why not just pick one that looks fun, so I ordered the GMA-P2100-4AER (which is pink).

The F-105W is the F-91W perfected.

I've joked that if I got rich, I'd wear an F-91W - I've found the same, I don't think I've had an F-91W last a year. If I wore them, I'd have to replace them all the time. So I wear a G-Shock.

Timex Ironman has a nice big start/stop button, plus some running-oriented features. Most models also have the Indiglo backlight which I like.

https://timex.com/products/ironman-classic-30-mid-size-resin...

I didnt know i have memories of this watch till you mentioned. One of my friends had it :).

Tried some other watches for kids, the interactions are so confusing compared to casio.

What you're describing is how the watch market bifurcated after quartz watches came out. Mechanical watches were previously utilitarian devices, made to be as thin as possible and sold at a premium because they were the most accurate timekeeping devices that could be possibly made at that size. If you had a large watch, it meant it was cheap. After quartz watches came out, mechanical watches could no longer compete on size, accuracy, or features, so they took their current role of being personal accessories for men, a sort of socially acceptable jewelry. They got larger and flashier because the point of the watch became personal expression (or social signalling at the high end) rather than simply telling the time.

You can see that digital watches are superior by every non-aesthetic measure. Reliability, resistance to mechanical shock, timekeeping (You had one job!) , life before "charges", size, weight, life without maintenance etc. I found a digital watch I hadn't touched in ten years, and it was still running, and still close to the real time.

I wear a mechanical watch (Bremont F15 watch) as a kind of fancy-dress jewelery. It's a fashion / social thing. As a tool, it does not compare favorably.

If I'm digging up the garden or changing the tyres on my car, I'm going to want my G-Shock. Quartz, solar powered, radio synchronized, and basically indestructible. After WW3 it's going to be just cockroaches wearing G-Shocks.

I’ve owned a few mechs and eventually sold all of them. Too fiddly, hated worrying about the accuracy.

I have a digital Casio with an analog display. It's solar, so it never needs to be charged. It sets itself to the correct time, and date, across DST and timezone changes.

It doesn't have the mechanical beauty of an automatic with a perpetual calendar, but is otherwise better in every way that matters, and it is just as pretty.

Even Casio started recently to produce mechanical watches, and for their prices they srent bad at all, love the design lf the efk-11