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Many moons ago, William Gibson did a piece for Wired about his obsession with mechanical watches[1]. The whole thing is worth a read but this bit is worth quoti
by staplung 1y ago
Many moons ago, William Gibson did a piece for Wired about his obsession with mechanical watches[1]. The whole thing is worth a read but this bit is worth quoting:
"""
Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.
Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.
And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are, in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond, Tamagotchi-like, to "love," in the form, usually, of the expensive ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly restored from virtually any stage of ruin.
"""
https://web.archive.org/web/20240930092315/https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240930092315/https://www.wired...
- philshem 1y agoAnother nice longform essay, from the NYer (2017) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of-a-watch-geek https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of...
- CSSer 1y agoIt reminds me of the Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests
- nayuki 1y ago> mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age Clocks have discrete ticks. They are digital devices. Even a base-60 second hand is digital because the number of states is finite. Mechanical and digital are not mutually exclusive concepts. For example, "The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine Going further, I could argue that the digital age is very old. Humans who wrote numbers for accounting purposes were engaging in a digital activity; only the numbers matter, not the medium they were written on or the exact handwriting style of the scribe who wrote those numbers. DNA is a form of digital data conveyed through a sequence of 4 possible symbols, and DNA predates humans by billions of years. The pedantic phrase substitution for "pre-digital age" would be something like "age before widespread digital electronic computers on solid-state microchips" (thus differentiating from analog electronic computers and vacuum tubes).
- tokai 1y agoDigital has three meanings; having to do with fingers and toes. Having to do with something discrete. And having to do with computers, with electronic as synonym. You are arguing from the second definition while the quote is of the third definition.
- nayuki 1y ago> And having to do with computers, with electronic as synonym. Computers do not have to be electronic. Counterexamples: Mechanical calculators, LEGO logic gates, hydraulic logic valves, electrical (not electronic) relays. Heck, even human meatbags were called "computers" back in the day.
- theamk 1y agoTechnically correct, but you are being pedantic. It was pretty clear to me that the 3rd sense of "digital" pertains to modern-ish electronic digital computers. I would not call mechanical calculator, human or hydraulic logic "digital computer". (Relay computer is on the fence)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amscanne 1y agoYou’re being needlessly pedantic. Obviously, “computers” also has varied meanings. In this case, it is referring to systems built with discrete electronics and ICs. That is, its operation is based almost entirely on the manipulation of electrons and their associated fields. Watches are nice because it’s much less common to have such tiny precise physical machines anymore, since so many of these use cases have been replaced by “computers”.
- gweinberg 1y agoIt would be absurd to say an analog electronic computer was digital.
- snovv_crash 1y agoI have a feeling we'll feel the same looking back on combustion engine cars.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoWe already do. Lots of people love older cars (say, from the 80s or earlier) because they are a mechanical system without a computer controlling everything. They are something you can understand and work on yourself without having to own a lot of specialized equipment.