Leon Mika

Seeing all the nostalgia for digital watches of the ’90s and early 2000s, following the release of retroest desk clock shaped like a large Casio digital watch, it got me thinking of the watches I owned growing up. I started off as a Casio person but I eventually moved on to Timex watches. I was pretty happy with all the watches I owned, but my favourite was the Timex Datalink USB Sports Edition, which stood head and shoulders about the rest.

Not only was this watch featureful out of the box — having the usual stopwatch, timers, and alarms — it was also reprogrammable. There was some Windows software that allowed you to install new modes and arrange them in the mode menu. I remember a few of these, such as a mode allowing you to browse data arranged in a tree; a simple note taking mode; and a horizontal game of Tetris.

There was also an SDK, allowing you to build new modes in assembly. I remember building a score keeping mode, where you could track points for a game between two or four competitors, with an optional auxiliary counter used to keep track of things like fouls. I also remember building a dice rolling mode, allowing you to roll up to 6 dice, with each dice having between 2 to 9 sides, and the total automatically being displayed to you.

I never used these modes for anything — I’m neither sporty nor much of a gamer to have any real need for tracking scores or rolling multiple dice — but they were super fun to build, and I got a fair bit of experience learning assembly from it. And the SDK was pretty well built, with predefined entry points for the mode, reacting to events like button presses, and displaying things on the LCD. The fact that the SDK came with a random-number generator, which wasn’t even used with any of the built-in modes, just showed how well Timex thought about what was possible with this watch.

This was the last watch I regularly wore: I’ve moved to using phones to keep track of time. But it was a great watch while it lasted.