Yet another Hacker News

Casio Watches of the 1980s

120 points karagenit 2 hours ago 57 comments

mikece 2 hours ago | parent

They worked then, they still work.

Exactly what a watch should do.

Casio nailed it!

rc1 2 hours ago | parent

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

j45 2 hours ago | parent

This site is a great flex in innovation over decades.

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent

Wearing a Casio watch right now (gifted to me by my brother), I really love Casio ;)

One watch is enough for me and that's casio for me.

aronhegedus 1 hour ago | parent

F91w and g-shock are top tier. Love them

itisit 1 hour ago | parent

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

neckro23 12 minutes ago | parent

I have both and I thought so too at first, but compared to the F-91 the F-105 has significantly lower contrast display (darker background) and is harder to read in daylight. The F-91 has slightly larger numerals too.

I've come to the conclusion that the F-91 is better for urban conditions where there's always light and/or a cell phone available, but the F-105 is probably better for going off-grid.

(some context for bystanders: the F-105 is the "illuminator" version of the F-91, so the light feature works much better.)

anyfactor 1 hour ago | parent

I often tell myself that I am conscious and rational when it comes to gifts. I don't care about brands, but rather the value something offers. Yet I do have a soft spot for "Made in Japan" Casio vintage watches and Sony devices.

To me, they represented the highest form of functional and consumer utility at a justified price. No fluff, no marketing that bordered on propaganda. Japanese consumer technology meant something incredibly precious to people in underdeveloped and developing nations.

It wasn't just about utility. It was about social status, too, and owning a generational asset that would continue to work for decades.

A Japanese consumer device meant that you had worked hard to afford a luxury, and that luxury did not derive its merit from a brand name, but rather from manufacturing ethics, quality, and the long-term, sustainable value it offered, all while being at the cutting edge of technology.

A Rolex watch uses essentially the same mechanical principles that have existed for generations. Its merit today is largely in its brand, not in being at the cutting edge of technology. An iPhone, on the other hand, is largely seen as consumable. Most modern electronic devices are treated as disposable, depreciating products.

But a Made in Japan Casio watch in the 1980s or 1990s was an asset.

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

I see it when I talk to people in their 60s or 70s who struggled to raise families in developing countries on middle-class incomes. A Casio calculator for their children when they start their high school. A Sony TV for the family to gather around and watch. A Toyota as their first family car.

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.

I don't want to hear about GDP, artisanal blue jeans, or deer based tourism industry when it comes to Japan. I see how an industry and an economy that once produced these things on such an extraordinary scale have been diminished.

I don't want to rationalize it or dissect it.

I simply find it truly beautiful what that nation once built on an industrial scale.

jttnr 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sporedro 1 hour ago | parent

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.

al_borland 1 hour ago | parent

I went down the watch rabbit hole for a while. When I was looking for a travel watch, I was stubbornly looking for a mechanical watch. I also wanted it to handle the issue that arises with countries like India, which are 30 minutes off all the other time zones. This was a nearly impossible task, and prices grew to the point where I didn't think I would even feel comfortable traveling with such a watch.

I stewed with this problem for the better part of a decade, without a solution.

I then stumbled across the Casio AE1200, their world timer. As I thought about it, this was the perfect choice. With a 10 year battery, I could just grab it and go (changing the battery whenever I renew my passport), I didn't have to deal with setting a bunch of complications, because the quartz movement just kept it going all the time. It solved the IST problem. The low cost meant that I could travel without having to worry about my watch... if something happened, oh well, get another one. Along with that, I wouldn't make me a target for pickpockets. I had been so caught up in watch culture that I didn't realize being cheap could be a feature in the right context.

I've had it for about 3 years now and still smile every time I wear it. Sure, it's a cheap Casio I picked up at some random retail store... but it took me 10 years to grow into the person who could appreciate it and it solved a problem that I thought about way too much for the previous decade. It's one of my cheapest watches, if not the cheapest, yet I think it's my favorite one.

A tip for anyone in the market: There is a lot of ugly text on this watch. It can be erased with an eraser. I used a white plastic eraser. At first it doesn't seem like it's doing anything, and then the text is gone. This is much better than the chemical solutions some videos online use.

I was tempted to upgrade the bracelet, case, and crystal. There are options for metal and sapphire from 3rd parties, but if I did that, I'd then be more worried about losing it, which is an anti-feature when traveling. I have intentionally kept it stock other than erasing the text on the case itself to stay true to that realization I had a few years ago.

And credit where credit is due, I think it was the Talking Watches episode with John Mayer and Ed Sheeran that made me realize cheap was a feature. They were showing all these crazy one-of-one watches they had custom-made from AP and alike, but they both just traveled with a G-Shock for some peace of mind.

123jh 1 hour ago | parent

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

Right. Thanks, ChadGPT.

criddell 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

chihuahua 51 minutes ago | parent

Sure, but the Japanese brands can deliver this for $100, not $10,000.

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

> 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?

stkai 1 hour ago | parent

Archive in case the site is giving you an error: https://archive.is/XD4QB

esafak 1 hour ago | parent

It's hard to describe how optimistic society, and futuristic such consumer technology felt as it rapidly advanced in the 60s-80s. There used to be television shows about the technology of the future, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow's_World and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Tomorrow_(TV_series)

It used to be harmless things like a watch, or a portable music playing device. After 2000 you started to worry about what technology extracted from you, and now we're getting to the stage where are worrying about what it's going to do to us intellectually, and soon, physically.

Liuser 1 hour ago | parent

CGW-50 showing the planetary orbits and Hailey’s comet is really cool.

Out of curiosity went to check if I could buy it but they unfortunately discontinued and now secondary markets list it in the thousands.

kimmk 1 hour ago | parent

I like Casio watches but I'd like them more if the watch faces weren't splattered with "Water resist", "Chrono alarm", and such labels. Yes I don't need to be reminded this watch indeed is an chrono alarm, like an advertisement, every time I look at it.

deadbabe 1 hour ago | parent

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.

forinti 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sublinear 58 minutes ago | parent

I don't agree this is exclusive to the 80s. We kept getting this shit plastered onto everything until well into the 2000s.

The Gen Z obsession with Frutiger design wouldn't be the same without the matching typography.

tromp 52 minutes ago | parent

My favorite is the (partly analog) PRW-7000FC-1JF, as seen on https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-e31c8/images/stencil/1280x12...

osener 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

mingus88 40 minutes ago | parent

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

jeffreportmill1 1 hour ago | parent

I had a Casio in 1985 that I swear fell out of a time portal. It had a large touch screen face and allowed me to enter 50 contacts (name + phone) and had calculator functionality via touch screen (no key pad). It is not shown on this Casio page and I’ve never seen a reference to it despite it being years ahead of its time.

jeffreportmill1 1 hour ago | parent

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

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6ae62084ab4081918e5fa21a4ec916a2

nrjames 1 hour ago | parent

I had a Casio watch in the early to mid 1980s that tracked the tides based on geo coordinates you entered and would tell you the best time to go fishing. They still promote them for this purpose:

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/types/activity/fishing-watc...

It looked something like this:

https://www.wilberforcewatches.com/products/casio-fish-en-ti...

Maybe the FT-100 or the more simple W-100?

franczesko 1 hour ago | parent

For anyone who might be interested, Ollee Watch from Canada is a VERY interesting project to tinker with.

hollow-moe 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | parent

I understand the massive difference between these and a mechanical watch, but I just cannot see myself ever using a digital watch. Ever... not even one these new super cool Garmin ones or even an Apple watch, I almost put them all in the same bag, including these Casio legendary watches.

There is something so beautiful about a mechanical watch... I am not even talking hyper expensive stuff, there's always Seiko, Citizen, Rotary and hundreds more... so its not a flex, its just an understanding of having to look at the time and not seeing a nasty digital number. Maybe its because i work looking at screens all day.

clircle 1 hour ago | parent

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

pelagicAustral 54 minutes ago | parent

True. It can be a pain in ass, but it can also be part of the allure... plus, you do also have non-mechanic analog beauties like some of these Citizens that come with the craziest thing, they automatically set the time based on radio towers in the northern hemisphere, i mean who the fuck thinks about stuff that? And they charge with light, not the sun, light... forgot the name of the technology... then you have the Bulova Super Seville that also has a super interesting quartz mechanism, keeps the heartbeat of the watch operating at a rate that makes the seconds hand move as if it was a mechanical watch,and battery last a decade or something... those also super interesting watches...

blackztar 1 hour ago | parent

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

rwmj 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

pelagicAustral 26 minutes ago | parent

Good point. I have recommended G-Shocks in the past, to people that, like yourself, like to be out there and do stuff... it is most definitely about lifestyle too. I dont garden and I dont really go out for long walks a la Into the Wild... so a mechanical is just fine to tell me its about time to fuck off from the office, but I get that its just not going to cut it if in the middle of nowhere running from bears.

ndiddy 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

hulitu 1 hour ago | parent

The chinese clones were more interesting. You had 7 songs to choose from.

ataru 48 minutes ago | parent

I was looking at the Casio calculator catalogue recently, and I noticed there are a lot of different models. They're all broadly the same, but each one has slightly different combinations of features and appearance. The watch collectors on YouTube show that there's been hundreds of different Casio watches as well. I wonder why they create so many different models. Could it be related to the work culture of the Japanese companies? Or do they just want to have a different product for every use case?

lysace 32 minutes ago | parent

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

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

Watches: 6670

svantana 29 minutes ago | parent

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"

loire280 46 minutes ago | parent

So many of the cool, revolutionary features of these watches look so hard to use and can't possibly have been used regularly by their owners (translation dictionary lookup? scientific calculator?). Reminds me of the Windows CE devices I was kind of obsessed with as a teenager that were amazing but kind of useless because of their form factor.

decoydave 44 minutes ago | parent

I have a data bank and a pela thin watch, still great today!

insane_dreamer 38 minutes ago | parent

g-shock is also an excellent first watch for kids/teens ; indestructible and runs forever (like the '90s Toyota or Honda Civic)

999900000999 36 minutes ago | parent

I do love that from a 15$ Casio to a 15k one, the community loves them all.

You can get a 40$ watch that has radio accurate time keeping!

expedition32 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

gosen 27 minutes ago | parent

I've lost my apple watches recently, and I've been using different versions of apple watches for about 7 years. I thought I won't come back to regular watches, but I've decided to try and bought a cheap classic Casio watches for ~30 bucks. After 2 months I must admit that I don't really need smart watches :D

lysace 25 minutes ago | parent

And you don't even have to charge them nightly.

gosen 13 minutes ago | parent

YES! it's really one of the most annoying things about smart watches. I had a reminder for myself for every evening to charge my watches :D

lysace 8 minutes ago | parent

I kind of want a smartwatch, but not until this is solved.

anoojb 3 minutes ago | parent

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

kbutler 24 minutes ago | parent

They didn't mention the watch I wanted so badly and my parents got for me in 1981 - the "Melody Alarm" or "12-Tune Musical Alarm/Chronograph by Casio".

I was delighted to find a youtube video of it - the music brings back such memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJdKt9JwRkc&t=90s

https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1981-Sea... (#21 third from bottom left) https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1981-Sea...

I'm sure the $50 was a huge expense for them at the time, but I sure loved that watch! Westminster chimes on the hours. Staying up to hear it play Jingle Bells for 12am on Christmas and have it wish me Happy Birthday. Having it accidentally go off in Church or school.

It introduced me to some classic songs I hadn't known before, and I'd run through its repertoire for fun, or just cycle through the modes to play the scales.

I wore it long after its stainless steel was scratched and worn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71hN_VW2aI

Maybe if I make an emulator I'll start wearing a watch again!

system2 23 minutes ago | parent

Weird, they did not have J-100s and AQ-500 images in the 1980s collection, but I can find them on the internet.

Also, in the 2020s, they seem to have given up on watches.

krapp 22 minutes ago | parent

None of them turn into a little robot. Lame.

vlyan 10 minutes ago | parent

so much sovl.

I loved window shopping for watches as a kid. idk if it was a Casio, but I did eventually convince my parents to get me one with a calculator. it was the coolest thing I owned in the 90s, other than Dendy.

rstarast 7 minutes ago | parent

SDB-300W and its descendants are still unmatched as a runner's wristwatch. Just give me a watch with buttons like that that reliably trigger instantly with a satisfying beep.

Is there anything like that around, suitable for timing to the 0.1s level?

bketelsen 4 minutes ago | parent

I used my paper route money saved up for 2 or 3 months to buy a C80 when I was in 5th grade. I loved that thing so much. It was a fun moment of nostalgia clicking on this link.