LED Watches & the Pulsar P3
It's been a while since I made a video about wristwatches, this one focuses on the early LED digital models. There are few things in this world less fashionable than a LED watch, which is exactly why they might have finally become fashionable again - everyone loves an underdog.
In this video I take a look at the Pulsar P3, a timepiece that went from riches to rags and then back to being relatively affordable again.
In other news - by working myself half to death I've finally managed to get five weeks ahead on my videos. So if you've recently become a Patreon for the tier where you name will appear at the end of each video - you will have to wait approximately a month before you see the fruits of your generosity. However since donations are collected at the start of each month it might still end up falling in line with your first payment.
I've got some really fun things lined up for the coming weeks - I think you'll especially enjoy the videos for the first couple of weeks of April.
LED Watches - 70's Retro Cool : Feat. the Pulsar P3 (YouTube)
Comments (37)
One cool watch, but I still prefer the nixie tube models for their absolute geekiness!
That Commodore LED watch is might tempting
<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MOIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA125&redir_esc=y" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MOIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA125&redir_esc=y</a>#v=onepage&q&f=false
I actually built an LED watch kit made by Sinclair - around 1973 I'd guess. What's more, it worked too! I just found one, un-built, on Ebay! <a href="https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1970s-vintage-SINCLAIR-BLACK-WATCH-LED-kit-w-metal-bracelet/192473079666?hash=item2cd04a1f72:g:RuAAAOSwK5tanC8b" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1970s-vintage-SINCLAIR-BLACK-WATCH-LED-kit-w-metal-bracelet/192473079666?hash=item2cd04a1f72:g:RuAAAOSwK5tanC8b</a>
I spent all of today building an expensive electronics kit that I managed to destroy in the process. I’m definitely not skilled enough to try something like that.
I got my first LED watch on the cheap -- as in, free! My parents had a restaurant in the 70s and one unlucky customer left his behind. Imagine my delight at 14 having such a watch, but not knowing its value. Alas, one winter day while wearing it I took my acrylic sweater off over my head -- ZAP -- only to hear a loud BEEP, and it wasn't long before January came to have 34 days. That was my introduction to static discharge.
Once again, a great video! I got the Pulsar P2 in 1973 or '74 when I was 13 or 14 years old. I had recently seen Live and Let Die and HAD to have it and somehow managed to convince my parents to buy it for me. About 10 years ago I found it in a box after sitting unused since about 1979 or '80. I got the spacers for the newer batteries and was pleasantly surprised to find it still worked. It was again sitting unused for the last 5 years or so but I resurrected it after seeing this video and will start wearing it again. I always got lots of comments about how stylish and unique it was. Keep up the good work!
I expect most people who got a Pulsar P2 in 1973/4 were over 40 years old at the time, so even if they kept the watch ever since then, many of them will have passed away. I suspect you are in a very exclusive club of original owners who can still use their old watch from 44 years ago - I'd definitely wear it with pride.
Fascinating little thing. I didn't even know anyone had tried to do LED watches before today! I wonder how expensive it would have been back then to make one of green or even blue LEDs... I liked this video a lot, even though it's a bit out there from what I'm more interested in (audio tech mostly). Your presentation makes it quite engrossing!
Its funny how quickly some things get forgotten. Its easy for us old fogies to forget how much time has passed.
"Best not to rub a balloon on your head while you're doing it". That made me laugh. Great video, thank you.
I am one whiskey away from getting one of those Commodore models. Darn you, sir.
I never was that much into watches, especially when i bought my first organizer. Used, for 10 DM, but boy was i proud of that thing. A computer i could put in my pocket! Mind -> Blown! :D
Had one in the mid 70’s. Can’t remember the make but I rarely got 6 months out the battery - it was a real pain, as you needed 2 hands to get the time. I eventually replaced it with a Junghans LCD - their 1st, it had the benefit of also being radio controlled - the accuracy more than made up for it not lighting up!
Oh yes you can 100% see why they disappeared, I forgot to mention that they aren't too easy to read outdoors either. I just like the fact that they went from being a luxury technological triumph to discarded within 10 years - with their heyday only really lasting the three years from 1974-1977.
If that was a retirement gift, I'm assuming that Dick died of old age a long time ago. :-) Gotta find me that watch back opening tool. I have an old Nautica watch I wouldn't mind resurrecting.
Good old Dick’s watch lives on though, I doubt my smartwatch will still be around in 40 years. Watch back opening tools are all over eBay...one of those combined with a watch strap altering tool can save you quite a bit of money over the years.
Great video, as always. I (vaguely) remembering buying one of these for my dad as a Christmas gift from all the kids back in the early/mid 70s. I can't remember the exact year, but it could not have been an original Pulsar at those prices. Beautiful memory, thanks for stirring it. Anyway- what is that TOOL you used to open the watch? I love it. I want it!
It’s a watch back opening tool. I bought it from eBay - the chap who sold me the batteries included it as a set. I expect it will come in handy again. I do have other watch opening tools, but it’s much more compact. Edit - here’s the link <a href="https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1970s-Pulsar-386-Batteries-with-Spacers-Customised-Wrench-Instructional-DVD/312071891061" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1970s-Pulsar-386-Batteries-with-Spacers-Customised-Wrench-Instructional-DVD/312071891061</a>
Glad you noted Better Call Saul, that's been an oddly pleasant discovery since that (awesome) show debuted. I've noticed that sometimes either Jim Rockford or the villains on Rockford Files wear them. My first LED was gifted to me in the 4th grade, 'Sears' brand and was round. Since then I've acquired dozens, most of them back in the 90's when they were still regarded as trash. There's some amazing Fossil LED watches from the 90's as well - and they also have the segmented and dotted displays. One is a Pulsar homage that might actually be more lovingly crafted than the original - and then closed out of Fossil shops for $10 / ea. I bought a dozen of them, then gave them away to my students when I was an English teacher in Japan. I now have a P3 Pulsar in stainless with a metal bracelet. It runs about 15 minutes fast per day and I'm wondering if there's a way I can adjust the speed. Some LED watches have a potentiometer on the circuit board for speed, but I'll bet one would need very specialized equipment to properly set one. Thx again for the great video. Wish I was British, would be fascinating to meet you at the pub ...
I used to enjoy looking through the watches at the Fossil shops when I first saw them in the US in the 90s...they had some fun models. Then they all went analog and I lost interest. Someone somewhere will be more than be happy to attend to your Pulsar, it’s just a matter of finding them. I’d ask for help on one of the forums. 15 mins per day is a bit crazy...I’d imagine that they’re supposed to do better than that over a year.
Interesting that Gerald Ford was criticised for wearing this. In Thailand at the moment, the deputy Prime Minister (Prawit Wongsuwan) is also being critcised for wearing expensive watches. He was photographed wearing a Richard Mille watch while putting his hand over his eyes. Since then, it's become an Instagram meme for people to pose with their hand over their eyes and showing their wristwatches. The criticism of Prawit is that, as a military officer, his salary is far too low to afford this watch. (And he has 25 of them.) But despite his obvious corruption, he has not been investigated or sacked.
That's quite a bit more blatant than pool old Gerald who received his as a gift. So it didn't cost him or the taxpayers anything. He survived two assassination attempts, so I feel he was entitled to a few luxuries. [Typo fixed - damn you autocorrect]
I think half the charm of these watches is the glow that the LEDs shine on all the other components of the watch, not the actual numbers! In addition, there's something deeply, satisfyingly ironic about the solid-gold version of this watch.
That's exactly my feeling about them - it's a bit like the gold Edition Apple Watch smartwatch a few years ago. They clearly learned nothing from the LED era of the 70s. If you spend a fortune on a watch, you want to be able to hand it down to your son on your deathbed...and you want him to want to wear it.
I missed the LED watch era. I think it was probably already 1981 or later by the time I got my first watch and it was LCD, of course. Still, very cool and informative video!
It's more than likely if anyone reads this you'll get half a dozen in the mail. ;-)
I recall laying down $40 for a cheap LED watch in a Kmart (US Discount chain) in 1975(ish) and being overly impressed by a watch that took two hands to operate. My primary memory for watches was the explosion of LCD beasts with every song known to man encoded in their alarms and hourly chimes in the late 70s/early 80s. Jewelry shops had rack after rack of the silly things.
Great video. I always used to stare at the bright led displays in awe when I was a kid, something mesmerizing about the vivid digits.
Don't forget the Mood Ring, as far as going out of style fast.
I don’t think James Bond ever had one...but I could be mistaken. Seriously though, I’ve only ever heard about them through TV shows. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough at the time, or perhaps they weren’t a thing around here. Like the Pet Rock, I think they might have been more a US thing. Although we did have the Grass Head and those Trolls with the fluffy hair.
Fabulous! Great video as always. Really takes me back to the 1970s. I still well remember the day a school friend brought an electronic pocket calculator into school to show off in about 1973. It was the first time we had seen an LED display and were completely mesmerised by it - until the batteries went flat. My father splashed out on a Sinclair Cambridge pocket calculator - it was about £50 - a lot of money back then, and I think it only had the 4 basic arithmetic functions. I vaguely remember that there were also some watches with green LED displays - or is my memory playing tricks on me? Thanks you and keep up the good work, Mat!
No, you’re not imagining it there were some green ones, funnily enough I was looking on eBay the other day for green led and you just get a lot of modern green plastic watches in the results.
Well, thank god for Dick (that's what she said) and his watch. I digress, it was quite odd that I happened to have rewatched your video on the Hewlett Packard wrist watch whilst I was working today. Very cool watch, had a very cheap chinese led one a few years ago that I thought was the bee's knees. It was junk but still, I liked it. Love the videos, take care.
Nice work, as ever. My first digital watch was a National Semiconductor LCD bought from one of those small ads that used to appear in newspapers. It cost less than a fiver and I think it was old stock. The UK has its own LED watch but it turned out not to be a glittering success: <a href="http://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm</a>
You continue to impress with your brains and good taste. I don't think a better video on LED watch history could have been done, with the extensive old documents and photos and other data you located, etc. And you even have great personal taste (spending your own time watching Better Call Saul and Technology Connections youtube channel). You are a great example of how when the content is done first class, the subscribers and patreon dollars will follow! - Good job!
Thanks for the positive words. I really just make videos about things I find interesting and hope others do too. If nothing else these videos are a reminder to me of the things I’ve bought over the years.