iamnadiaah

[contac]

[gameraboy2]

Sony Watchman

[uchihanitro]

Sony Color Watchman

[petshopnoias]

Sony Watchman Portable TVs

[taperwolf]

When I was browsing at a local thrift store, I came across something that I might have picked up — if I didn't already have one in storage somewhere.

This is the Sony Watchman FD-C290 TV/Radio alarm clock. It has an LED clock display, an AM/FM radio, and a tiny television. You'd expect something of this size to be a little LCD display, and ten or twenty years later you'd be right — but this little guy came out in the late 1980s, so those didn't exist. No, this thing has a CRT.

(This photo is taken from a teardown of the related FD-20 by experimental-engineering.co.uk .)

Now, the story of how I came to have one of these is a bit odd. My senior year in high school — 1993-4 — I got together with another guy in my class to do a science fair project. Now, we were in rural Wyoming, and it was pretty rare for even people in big cities to have access to the internet, but our bright idea was to build a virtual reality setup.

I'd picked up a book with a CD attached which included a software package called Rend386, which would display, in real time and on 80386 and 80486 PCs, very constrained virtual worlds. These were incredibly simple, of course; to my memory it was primitive-based, where you could define cubes, cylinders, and spheres, and combine those into more complex shapes, with a degree of animation and interactivity possible. I don't think there were hardware 3d graphics available yet at all in the PC world, so this was all running on incredibly overtaxed CPUs. But it did give a glimpse of what VR would become.

The software supported two bits of repurposed game hardware: the active 3d glasses Sega made for the Master System, and the Nintendo Power Glove. By some coincidence, those two items, and a couple of Sony Watchmans (one standalone and one in a clock radio), were standing dusty on the electronics shelf of the local Ben Franklin/Ace Hardware, and by further coincidence my mom worked there at the time; she talked her boss into discounting the stuff to be purchasable by our meager funds.

The glasses worked by blocking one eye, then the other, while you looked at a screen that showed the scene from each eye's viewpoint in synchrony. The PowerGlove worked by having bend sensors to detect your hand making a fist, and ultrasonic sensors to detect its position in 3d space. The book gave directions for building a circuit to interface the two to a PC, which my friend followed, since he was the one who knew how to solder. (I wouldn't learn until decades later.) And this all actually worked, most of the time — you could steer your avatar, rendered by a single floating hand, around the simple world via joystick, see everything in 3d, and pick up and drop designated objects by moving your hand into them and making a fist. Of course, the frame rate was terrible, and using the glasses cut that in half, but it was all pretty exciting at the time. One of the big demos was navigating around some objects and walking onto a Ferris wheel, which would lift you up in the air and everything.

The book had some stuff about getting two VGA cards to run on the same machine, in order to output the two stereo views at the same time, and to use expensive displays and optics to create a head-mounted display. But our quick-and-dirty plan was to take the VGA signal from the computer, convert that down to NTSC video and use an RF modulator to put it on a TV channel, and feed it into the two Watchmans, which we'd affix to the glasses, one attached over each eye; they'd both be showing both views, but you'd only be able to see the proper ones. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and technical skills, and the science fair hit when we were still displaying on a big CRT. We actually went to the state science fair with that project, though it didn't get much love from the judges there.

I inherited most of the equipment afterwards — my friend claimed the standalone Watchman — and I'm not entirely sure if I still have the PowerGlove or not. But I do have the clock radio. Somewhere.

[insanitysrequiem]

aw hell nah she put her custom in-home TV network on the Sony watchman portable monochrome television and alarm clock combo

[flojocabron]

04/10/23: Post Easter gets! I got a message from a Facebook friend over the weekend saying he had a JPN ps4 collectors set for sale. He wanted $40 for it. I said yes, and I would see him on Monday. So when I made it back to the States, I met up with him at our mutual place, the thrift store. I gave him the money and I went to see what other goodies there were. I think I did well. Don't you think? I got all these things around $2.00 each. An Old Sony Watchman TV. An Xbox 360 power plug. A zip lock baggie with legos. And two Wii games; one Zelda and one Scooby-Doo still in wrapper. And once home, I got to see the rest of the ps4 game. Shin Sakura Taisen. It's a nice big box set, filled with six audio cds, a still sealed JPN ps4 game, artbook, and he even tossed in a steelbook case! Thanks buddy for the great stuff!

[cyberneurotism]

Sony Sports Watchman, Sony Mega Watchman and Sony FD-10 Pocket Watchman.

photos from Wikipedia / Austin Calhoon

[vintageadsmakemehappy]

1985 Sony Watchman

[richwall101]

1982 Sony Watchman Portable TV

The Sony Watchman is a line of portable pocket televisions trademarked and produced by Sony. The line was introduced in 1982 and discontinued in 2000.

[cooltrash95]

[ourladyofomega]

March, 2021. April* was one of my favorite customers I looked forward to seeing. A pale Irish girl of copper hair, glasses, brown eyes, and a canary voice. 20's. Nervous, but so sweet. One Saturday afternoon, she comes dressed in her red hoodie and red pajama pants, walks up to me and asked me for a power bank. I happily obliged. It was April.

On my way of showing them to her, she mentioned about buying some more accessories for her Watchman. I'm not much of a movie person, so that reference flew over me. Out of nowhere, she showed me this...

She pulled it out of her backpack, took it out of the box, and turned it on for me. I almost dropped dead in front of her. It was an actual still-working Sony Watchman. I read about these things all the time but never saw one in the wild, so here it was. She even went a step further and told me its' manufacture date: 1985. Nineteen-Eighty-fucking-Five.

April found one at Savers for only $4.00 before stopping at my location. She also bought an analog-to-digital converter from me to try and stream it to her flat-screen TV. The fact that it was her holding a Watchman in her hands and was still in working condition made my entire month for me. She knew her stuff.

There were a few more times where she actively looked for me to help her out with tablets or anything else she needed. The last time I saw her was 18 months ago when she came in with her poppy. I knew she was looking in my direction and I wanted to assist her as always. Too bad I was with a family of seven in home theater. Their father couldn't stop asking questions about pricing and differences of models. And I wanted so bad for the interaction to end.

By the time it was over, she and her pop- were gone. I let myself down solely because I couldn't get to her, bottom-line. She would've made all the difference. That was the last time I saw her.

I never got her out of my head since then.

[cogtropolis]

[formlab]

Sony Watchman FD-210BE

[gameraboy2]

Sony NFL Watchman, 1984

[scifiseries]

SONY Watchman concept art by Dennis Magdich (1989)