From: kolstad@cae.wisc.edu (Joel Kolstad)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Casio Databank Touch Screen Watches
Date: 12 Apr 92 04:19:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: doug.1992Apr11.231955.1841
Organization: College of Engineering, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

In article <60570009@hpcuhe.cup.hp.com> dclaar@hpcuhe.cup.hp.com (Doug Claar) writes:
>>A friend of mine in college a few years back claimed to have seen (had?)
>>a version of the DB in which the calculator included scientific and trigo-
>>nometry functions!  That would be GREAT!  Has anybody seen any such animal?
>>Can anyone tell me/us where to get it?

I had one, too.  It died.  So I bought a new one... RIGHT BEFORE CASIO 
DISCONTINUED THEM.  That was already some years back...  The only thing I 
didn't like about it was that there was NO WAY to inhibit the key beep.
In fact, for awhile I stuck a piece of paper between the back cover (beeper)
and the body (contact) -- being able to calculate in piece was more important
than having an alarm.

(Shuffling around room trying to find it) Yep, here it is.  Casio Model
CFX-40.  (Casio also made an earler model of scientific/calculator watch,
but it required you to "scan" throgh the functions, which made it nearly
unuseable.  The first model, though, had real little buttons instead of the
flat panel input that Casio is so fond of these days.

I just remembered something... this watch had a BUG in it!  I remember that
I had found a key combination that would totally garble the time display.
If you hit the main fucntion button so it returned to "normal" display, it
would be fine again.  But when you hit just the right key combination to
start with, it would go through this bizarre pattern of garbage on the display,
and eventually settle down into a garbage pattern that alternated on every
second.  Ha!  How many other people have discovered bugs in their wathces? :-)

It was a pretty obscure key combination... something like, select 2nd function
scientific functions, go back to the time display, set the time, and hit
something.  Almost impossible to do accidently.  I believe I stumbled into
it when I was trying all sorts of combinations to turn off the !@#$ beeper...
I just couldn't believe ther wouldn't be a way to turn it off!

I wonder... does anyone know what makes these watches tick?  It would seem that
something as complex as a scientific calculator couldn't be just a gigantic
state machine, like standard watches could... So maybe these watches have,
maybe, 4 bit CPUs and they're just running ROM?  (Although, to some degree,
the distinction between "monster state machine with huge amounts of
combinational logic for feedback" and "simple CPU" is pretty blurry...)

>I had one of these. It also did hex, octal, binary and decimal math,
>but it didn't have any phone or appointment storage capability. 

Unfortunately, binary was always 7 bit signed numbers.  So, if you wanted to
converter 253 to binary, you first had to subtract 256 of it would error
when you went to binary display mode.

Back in high school when I this was the watch I wore, there weren`t yet
enough people that I needed phone storage capability. :-)

>Unfortunately, it died. Finding no satisfaction at the local stores,
>I called Casio directly. No joy--they stopped making that model 
>several years ago. I guess not enough nerds#####people bought them.

I tend to buy the nerd@@@@techie watches that Casio makes, and have noticed
that it's pretty rare that I see someone else with the same model.  A lot
of people in my ECE courses have some variation of the standard data bank
watches, though; they seem to be getting pretty popular.

>I now have the DBC-62, which has a really lame calculator (at least
>compared to my old one, R.I.P.), world time, and room for 50 phone
>numbers or appointments. 
>
>What I'd really like to see is one that can be downloaded with
>appointments...and a decent calculator again. Sigh. I miss my
>old watch.
>
>--Doug Claar
>dclaar@cup.hp.com

When I win the lottery, I swear the first thing I'm going to do is go and
build some really cool nerd watches.  Except now I'm in college and know that
all self repecting calculators should use RPN. :-)

						---Joel Kolstad