Today $300 or less can buy a watch that runs UNIX, can emulate any machine in 1981 in realtime, and stream data from the ~~ARPA~~Internet over a wireless connection orders of magnitude faster than any leased line.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Sounds like a €30 smartwatch I've seen some 7 years ago. Yep, it costed that back then. It ran Android 4.4 and even the battery was user replaceable.
I think it was called QW09.
Unfortunately, I was 10 at the time, and €30 sounded like a lot to me, so I didn't buy it :(
Edit: Found some pics
this looks cool. Particularly this rectangular screen is great.
rectangular smartwatch master race
i don't care that watches used to be round because of a rotary mechanism. i want a SCREEN on my wrist and screens are square for a reason!
Tell me about it. They rather hamfistedly tried to fit a rectangular design language into a circular screen and it never quite works right.
I think you had it right, let's bring ARPANET back.
Good old floppydrive for ants
Aka micro SD.
I wonder if it would be possible to recreate something like this for real, with cartridges for each software/tool (like a gameboy or similar?), excluding the comically tiny keyboard probably :P
The size of that floppy does seem a decent match to a microSD card.
I'm really tempted to buy some RPi pico stuff or smth and see if i can make something similar
I'm curious if it would be possible to replicate somehow with a PineTime
Just seeing the Byte logo makes me want to open up that magazine and see which basic listings I can type in.
What is this, A keyboard for ants?
@larsbrinkhoff “Your fingers are too fat to operate this watch. To receive a special dialing wand, mash the keyboard with your palm, now.”
I love retrofuturistic tech. It even has a full qwerty keyboard, like anyone would be able to use it lol.
you'd have to use a needle to hit the keys lol
I miss Byte magazine so much. Now you've made me sad. I hope you're happy! (jk)
https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE (although contrary to the name it's not complete, only goes to 89)
Every time I think about smartwatches, I just think about how much I miss Pebble. I loved my Steel and Time Steel, and was bummed that the company failed before the Time Steel 2 happened.
RIP Pebble. I went through three of them that all ate it to their failing LCD. :(
god, i loved my pebble back in the day. Had an OG and picked up a Time a couple years ago to try Rebble. It's nice but it's just not the same anymore...
Forget the smartwatch, I want that 3.5 mm floppy!
Folks who like this may like Watchy, an opensource smart watch with an eink display, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 7 day battery life. I do not own one but it is a bit tempting. https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ make sure to check out the watch faces
I'm putting that on my birthday list.
Neat. This one looks pretty interesting too
BYTE had the best magazine covers
Yes, I want this