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Watches in the 21st Century

Berwhale

Berwhale

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pseudoid said:
Neat find @MRC01.
I am not going to the start of humanity but Curta's great-grandfather must have been the abacus, who had the offspring we call slide rule, which wikipedia refers to as "Mechanical analog computer".
I started in college w/HP-35 that had cost this poor college student near $500 USD. It came with a leather holster. Two weeks after purchase, I saw the HP-45 in the college store and was able trade-in the HP-35 for it, for an additional $50. At the time, the ReversePolishNotation (RPN) had sounded like an ethnic joke and took me a whole weekend to learn how to use it. But had great ROI along with many dividends. Mine had made mince meat of our finals that included heavy polar-to-rectangular (Cartesian) coordinate conversion. At that time, there was no rules about NOT using a calculator during the finals. It so happened that when I handed my final back to the professor within 30 minutes, he had not realized how powerful an HP-45 (scientific calculator) could be. It turned out that some of his answers were wrong because he had used a slide rule for them.
To this day, I still can't use a standard calculator, bcuz I only speak reverse-Polish (Fist#, Enter, Second#, function, third#, function) and the equal sign (=) does not exist in an RPN calculator.
View attachment 181709
I must have 'calculator OCD" as I had not realized how many calculators I have amassed since college… Until I assembled them for this family portrait shoot.
Click to expand...

I'll see you and raise you an HP-25...

IMG_20220125_223343 (Small).jpg


I have the full manual and charger somewhere as well.
 
OP
Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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@rdenney

Rick if I owned a Patek Phillippe Denny :):)

Hey buddy let's think really big. How about if I was a billionaire, had a house in Aspen and a 150' yacht?
 
maverickronin

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Blumlein 88 said:
That maybe a tracker watch in an unintended way. At least in the USA.
Click to expand...
Berwhale said:
I don't think the Red Army (allegedly) are particularly interested in where I walk the dog. I have a friend who worked for Huawei in the UK and met Ren Zhengfei (ex-Red Army general) when he visited. I'm told he didn't have much interest in meeting the staff and just wanted to have his lunch and watch Wimbledon on the TV (he'd been to see our Prime Minister earlier in the day).
Click to expand...

Better them than the NSA or FBI...for an American like me.

...and probably the reverse for the average Chinese citizen.
 
MRC01

MRC01

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I have a Citizen ecodrive I bought 10 years ago. I set it once when I first got it. Over the past 10 years it's needed no maintenance (not even a battery/capacitor) and It's never been more than 0.2 seconds from exact GMT.
Of course, it cheats every night by using an internal radio to get the time from WWV (5, 10, or 15 MHz) and set itself.

Which reminds me of an amusing story of needing an exact time when out in the middle of the ocean ...
 
L

LarryRS

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pseudoid said:
Neat find @MRC01.
I am not going to the start of humanity but Curta's great-grandfather must have been the abacus, who had the offspring we call slide rule, which wikipedia refers to as "Mechanical analog computer".
I started in college w/HP-35 that had cost this poor college student near $500 USD. It came with a leather holster. Two weeks after purchase, I saw the HP-45 in the college store and was able trade-in the HP-35 for it, for an additional $50. At the time, the ReversePolishNotation (RPN) had sounded like an ethnic joke and took me a whole weekend to learn how to use it. But had great ROI along with many dividends. Mine had made mince meat of our finals that included heavy polar-to-rectangular (Cartesian) coordinate conversion. At that time, there was no rules about NOT using a calculator during the finals. It so happened that when I handed my final back to the professor within 30 minutes, he had not realized how powerful an HP-45 (scientific calculator) could be. It turned out that some of his answers were wrong because he had used a slide rule for them.
To this day, I still can't use a standard calculator, bcuz I only speak reverse-Polish (Fist#, Enter, Second#, function, third#, function) and the equal sign (=) does not exist in an RPN calculator.
View attachment 181709
I must have 'calculator OCD" as I had not realized how many calculators I have amassed since college… Until I assembled them for this family portrait shoot.
Click to expand...
I'm with you on RPN. The only hand-helds I ever use are HP 11c's. And I use the RPNcalc 11c app on my computer. I think my brain is RPN - algebraic notation slows me down.
 
pseudoid

pseudoid

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What is wrong w/this picture?
MRC01 said:
iu
Click to expand...
I am surprised no one made a comment about the lack of "wrist" watches...

LarryRS said:
I'm with you on RPN. The only hand-helds I ever use are HP 11c's. And I use the RPNcalc 11c app on my computer. I think my brain is RPN - algebraic notation slows me down.
Click to expand...
I use the ExcaliburV2 (32bit) FREEware on windows since the Win97 days.
 
OP
Ron Texas

Ron Texas

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pseudoid said:
Hey buddy:facepalm:; do as I did and try to buy "the most authentic fake" Panerai Luminor Marina... if you can source it since the clamp-down on clones.
Click to expand...
Lots of places are selling fakes. Customs tries to stop them, but the sellers ship through intermediaries.

Steinhart makes very nice homage Rolex GMT's and Submariners. They are legal as the Rolex trademark is not infringed. When the waiter wearijng one brings the martinis, you won't have enough time to notice the difference. You can buy a fake Nautilus 5711 for a couple of hundred bucks, but if you don't look the part, everyone will know you are a poser.
 
MRC01

MRC01

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pseudoid said:
I only have one question. Are you some kind of a land-shark lawyer?
Click to expand...
mansr said:
It's useful for navigation.
Click to expand...
Something like 30 years ago, I worked for SAIC and got sent to visit an aircraft carrier to fix a weather acquisition and analysis system. It received polar orbiting satellite data with a SMQ-11, which has a rotating antenna that points to the satellite as it tracks across the sky (about 15 mins horizon to horizon). But they hadn't captured a satellite pass for a week, which is why they flew me out there.

Long story short, it turned out to be a clock problem. Due to the satellite's orbit altitude and speed, every 1 second of clock error is about 6 miles of distance when you align each raw data pixel to Earth. That's a lot but this was for weather, so it didn't have to be perfect. But if the clock was off much more than that you miss the data entirely. The computer that drove the SMQ-11 was produced by the lowest bidder (haha) and its clock drifted about 5-10 seconds per day. We had to find an absolute reference for the clock, which was surprisingly difficult out in the middle of the ocean.

Flash back to a few months earlier, my neighbor had given me an old Zenith shortwave radio and I had been having fun exploring the dial at night. Completely by accident I discovered time broadcast at 5, 10, 15 MHz. You know, "at the tone, US Naval Observatory Master clock will be ... BEEP". Flash back to the ship, on a long shot, I asked the guys in the meteorology lab (an ET and AG if any Navy guys are reading) if they had a shortwave radio. They start digging around the equipment racks and found one that had been provisioned with the ship but nobody had ever used. We plugged it in rigged up an antenna and it worked! I tuned it to 10 MHz and showed them how to get a Unix command prompt on the computer that drove the satellite antenna, use the "date" command to set the clock and hit ENTER exactly when the tone beeped. Young guys with good reflexes, they could get it within about a tenth of a second which was sufficient. BOOM! satellites all came in like magic.
 
pseudoid

pseudoid

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I knew I liked JamesBond's watches but had not realized he was so gauche and wore many Rolex in early days ('60s)... besides wearing few Gruens, a Breitling and a couple of digital Seikos.
I also was not aware that I have purchased two of those Omegas and #15 in this list that states the Seiko as "Unknown Watch" yet, looks to be in the family of the watch I posted in #55..
Coincidence?

mansr said:
It's useful for navigation.
Click to expand...
I had just thought that he was a disoriented lawyer lost at sea.;)
 
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