Lets face it, sports on the radio is awesome, until you see it on TV. Then, at some point in your life, maybe in your mid-40s, radio is cool again. Vinyl is fine for music, until you hear digital. Eventually you wish for the character of vinyl again. You listen to radio with your kids, or music on vinyl, and your kids eventually learn to appreciate it and say, "hey that is cool." Because it is.

We love our mechanical watches. We may appreciate other watches, but the vast majority of posts here are about mechanical, whether modern or vintage. There was a period of time, though, when the future was NOW. For all those of us who long for a manual wind moonwatch, there were those who, at the time of the actual moon landing, were dreaming of something revolutionary.

That revolution was introduced in April, 1972. I don't need to get into the history, heck I was still a few months from breathing in Spring 1972. There are others who have already written the stories, and, rather than plagiarize them, I will include links to their works:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/the-amazing-history-of-the-pulsar-watch

https://www.wired.com/2015/03/tech-time-warp-week-1972-digital-watch-cost-car/

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/four-revolutions-led-watches

So, as stated above, this watch production predates my "production" by just a few months. As such, I grew up a child of the 70's, Diff'rnt Strokes, Facts of Life, Brady Bunch Re-runs, Alice, and Walter Cronkite. I carried over to the 80's with Miami Vice, Dukes of Hazzard and LA Law. I coveted a Casio calculator watch to help me in 4th grade, and a LCD display to track my gym class lap times was an item to keep on the "Santa please still be real" list. I loved big, black plastic cases that took my beatings on the playground while staying securely wrapped around my wrist.

Now, I am older, wiser, and, functionally (and often, I fear, fraudulently) a mechanical watch hobbyist. I love the way we try to capture time with our ingenuity when that time has already slipped past us to the beyond as soon as we have thought to measure that moment. There is something empowering in seeing man's cleverness in marking passing moments while also recognizing the powerlessness of his control over how many of those moments he actually has.

Without getting even more goofy than this post already is, I had the pleasure of putting an authentic Hamilton Pulsar Time Computer (P1) on the wrist today. As the above links demonstrate, this is an important part of timekeeping history.





This is a really cool example, as the back of the case is soldered together and it has never been sent off for service. Many of these watches were passed up by technology very quickly and Hamilton sold the Pulsar name in the mid-late 70s. I am guessing a lot of these original solid golds models were melted down.

As one of the links suggests, there are only 6 known examples of this watch with the original 25-chip modules. I humbly submit that I am posting pictures now of the 7th.

The articles state that Hamilton started promoting this watch in 1970, but the production started in 1972. There were 400 of these 18k beauties made. This one was sent to the jewelers on April 11, 1972, one week after the watch was advertised in the Wall Street Journal for sale. Proof: Here is a photo of the jeweler's ledger book for the Hamilton Watches they received on April 11. Notice the "#1 18k Pulsar" notation in the watch book. See also the $2400 price listed off to the right. That is good money today; it was more than a car in 1972.



Finally, even though the watch was never sent off to replace the defective P1 chip with the quickly produced P2, the watch still lights up and keeps time, though probably not accurately. (I like the original box in the lower right).



If anyone has anything not mentioned in the above articles, I'd love to know it. This is a digital watch, but without this digital, I wonder if my mechanical watch would just be radio without TV, vinyl without digital. I wonder if my appreciation for the mechanical timepiece would be real, or simply expected.

So, I am thankful for this birth-year watch, the Hamilton Time Computer Pulsar P1.

 

The first quartz watch that I ever saw was in 1969. It was a Gruen, LCD. It was U G L Y! It was homely as a hedge fence, and about 1/2 inch thick. The price was $1,195.00. IIRC, these Hamilton Pulsars were re-set by using special magnets which were placed on the case back. No idea how that might work. I have a couple L E Ds and a couple L C Ds, myself. But not exotics like the Pulsar.

 

These light-emitting diode (LED) watches were the first System on Chip (SOC) integrated circuits, a big milestone in early semiconductor design and production. An SOC incorporates all of the electronic components necessary to implement a system on a single chip, including the digital, analog and the diode driver transistors. This was done primarily to improve reliability and get the cost out on these watches.

Pretty soon all of the major semiconductor manufacturers had their own branded LED watches and were slugging it out for market share with traditional watch manufacturers like Timex.

 

Oh, I wish I had taken a picture of the magnet! There is a compartment in the bracelet that opens to reveal a block "U" shaped (squared horseshoe shaped?) magnet. The magnet fits into the slots on the right side of the case. If you want to set the hours, you set the two prongs of the magnet in the top slot while holding onto the bottom cross piece of the "U"; to set the minutes, use the magent on the bottom slot. You can see the top slot pretty clearly if you are looking for it in the last picture I posted, where the time is displayed on the watch. It looks almost like a coke machine coin slot.



One more time, even closer:



The bottom slot does not appear clearly on my picture - it looks like a shadow effect. You can tell it is there if you are really looking for it. All it takes it a touch of the magnet and the minutes/hours start counting up until you remove the magnet.

There are a couple posts of these Pulsars here on the forum. I have seen them recently, including from a member a few months ago asking about service on a Tiffany & Co. watch given him by his father. I am not very proficient at the OF forum searching ( I always find interesting posts to then lose them and never find them again using what I think to be the same search - nat a complaint, just an honest assesment of my user [in]abilities).

If you can find one or two of those posts, you might see the slots more clearly, or, if I could find them and tag the original posters, maybe they could provide some pics of the magnet or the slots themselves.

Regards,

 

You may appreciate this site: http://www.timetrafficker.com/