EEVblog #1166 - Amazing 1980's Touch Screen Calculator Watch!

[EEVblog]

A dual layer touch screen calculator watch in 1983? Amazing!
Teardown of the rather obscure Casio TC-500

[ergya]

I love these things. In my country these things I believe got popular in the mid 90s, I was a child and we simply could not afford to get a calculator watch especially not for a "young player" like me. And a year ago I started thinking maybe I could afford it so started looking around and found that these things were/are not that cheap nor manufactured (at least the DataBank + calculator line) but I could not whitstand the temptation and I bought 1 used (actually I was lucky and managed to get one pretty cheap). And as you know how gateway drugs work I did not stop there . I made myself buy a Commodore 64 (wanted soooo bad as a child, could not afford either) along with some other stuffs like a digital diary (in my country we calle them manager calculators). Here is a picture of my little meaningless collection if I may

Oh and BTW, Seiko was playing with things back in the days too

[johnlsenchak]

If that watch  had the  capacity  of being  a "scientific  calculator  then  and only then would  it be   "Sex on a  Stick "

Sorry   that's a wanna-be  watch  calculator

[Zbig]

Sooo, for Dave, who gets triggered by any modern touchscreen-equipped device in his vicinity ("bloody touchscreens!", "bloody smartphones!"), it's suddenly oh-so-cool, most awesome thing in the world when it's old and it's Casio? Who else did I see going like that... oh yes, my dad!

[Xenawise]

The TC-50 (Resin Version), TC-500 (Stainless Version) and TC-600 (Updated fully Stainless version) all used the same module and was the first touch sensor watch that Casio put out. The pinnacle however was the AT-550 series of watches. Here you had a mechanical movement with hands and a LCD screen on the top portion of the face where you could see the numbers of the calculator. You actually had to draw the numbers and operations onto the face of the watch! Here is an advertisement for it from 1984:

 

[PA0PBZ]

Ah, memories! I still have my TC-600 which looks better because it doesn't have the ugly plastic bezel (sorry Dave) but I somehow scratched the glass cutting one of the touch screen connections  I wonder if it still works apart from that, maybe I should put a 1616 cell into it and see what happens.
Oh... googling the TC-600 brought up this EBay listing for a brand new touch screen... Should I?
https://www.ebay.com/p/Casio-Tc-600-Vintage-Crystal-Touch-Screen-Calculator-NOS-RARE-X10/1103766147

[Fungus]

I just looked up the price of a CFX-400 on eBay. 

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=CASIO+CFX+400