T hese days, you can step into a local drugstore and pick up a digital watch for $10-unless you're a bargain hunter or exceptionally conscious of style. One timepiece advertisement suggested that a fashion-conscious person would never dream of wearing the same watch all day long. So it offered watches with replaceable bands in designs appropriate for morning, tea time and evening wear. That set might cost more than $10.

Today's price for a digital wat ch wasn't always the norm. Indeed, the first digital watch wasn't a watch at all. It was a "solid-state wrist computer" and-in a steel case (designed, in case you're wondering, "by Ernest Trova, one of America's leading sculptors")-it would set you back $1,500. But you would have had to wait for delivery in early 1971 for what a Hamilton Pulsar advertisement in the May 10, 1970, New York Times called a space-age wrist computer.

Actually, you wouldn't get the watch even if you sent in an order. That watch was never manufactured. It didn't work. With the state-of-the-art of the day, it couldn't. It just had far too many parts: 2,200 metal-to-metal connections, 13 ceramic circuit boards, 144 discrete light-emitting diodes, three phototransistors and 44 ICs (from RCA and Hewlett-Packard). It was designed by Willie Crabtree at a small company, Electro/Data Inc., in Garland, Texas, where much of the assembly work was done by employees Jane Curry, Mary Arp and Al Torres.

With a BSEE from Texas A&M in 1953, Crabtree went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, where he spent four years before moving on to the Apparatus Division of Texas Instruments Inc. for a dozen years. While at TI, he earned an MSEE at Southern Methodist University in 1964.

He left TI in May 1969 to join three-year-old Electro/Data, a manufacturer of microwave products, as project engineer on the digital watch. When Electro/Data's founder, president and chairman, George H. Thiess, learned about Hewlett-Packard's LED displays, he figured that a digital watch using LEDs would be his company's key to diversifying into consumer products. He chose Crabtree to design it.

Time and money
He did. But Electro/Data needed funds for further development, and it needed somebody to market the watch. It found Hamilton Watch Company, an old-line prestigious manufacturer that had been doing research on a digital watch of its o wn. It had a program led by John Bergey, who had been with the company since 1959 and became its director of research in 1968. Based on the company's work on fuses for the U.S. government, Bergey felt that Hamilton could develop divider circuitry that would fit into a watch case.

Hamilton worked with RCA to get the necessary circuitry into ICs using a technology RCA had developed called COSMOS, for complementary symmetry metal-oxide semiconductor-a technology that, in time, enjoyed widespread use as CMOS.

After Hamilton met with Electro/Data and learned that the company had been developing a digital watch, it gave Electro/Data a contract in December of 1969. The nature of this contract is a matter of differing memories. Bergey recalls that it was a small, one-time contract for Electro/Data to assist Hamilton, to work with RCA and to assemble the various components into a breadboard and then a prototype watch.

Crabtree, on the other hand, recalls it as a "long-term contract" to fund refinements a nd for Hamilton merely to market the watch.

In early 1970, Electro/Data delivered prototypes and the relationship was terminated. On May 10, Hamilton ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing "a new era in the science of measuring time." The ad drew a large response and lots of orders for the $1,500 "solid-state portable wrist computer." But none were produced for sale.

In a press conference for the Time Computer (which Hamilton registered as a trademark), named the Pulsar, Hamilton said that this was the first new method of displaying time in 800 years. Since LEDs consume a lot of battery power, a user had to press a button to show the time. This button, Hamilton explained, gave the user a feeling of involvement.

Time hits a snag
Despite all the excitement, the Time Computer didn't work. An article in one trade magazine reported that Hamilton had thus far found bugs in six wat ches. The following paragraph added that the company had thus far produced six watches. At the press conference, Hamilton credited Electro/Data as being "a specialized supplier who worked closely with Hamilton in the development of Pulsar," which may have been the company's colorful description of the inventor.

Of the six watches that Electro/Data delivered, only three were brought to New York on the night before the press conference. On the following morning, only two worked. During the demonstration, one of that pair failed. An alert Hamiltonian went behind the curtain and switched watches, so the demonstration continued with the sole surviving working watch.

Crabtree remained at Electo/Data until it folded in 1973. He joined a spin-off, American Time, which made time and temperature signs for banks, and remained there till American Time moved to Tennessee in 1983. At that point he returned to TI, where he worked till 1991, when he retired to devote more attention to the study of golf-ball trajector ies.

Hamilton continued to pursue the digital watch and shrank it substantially. On March 23, 1972, it placed a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal for the $2,100 Pulsar Time Computer, now made by Pulsar, a division of Hamilton Watch. By Christmas, the company had sold 400 watches.

They were expensive to make, says Bergey. In those early days, RCA was getting a yield of 1 or 2 percent on a three-inch wafer, so the watch chip cost about $50. Today you can get a comparable watch chip for about 20 cents.

In the heady days of the 1970s, a good part of Hamilton was owned by Katy Industries. Katy created a shell, HMW Industries, which owned Hamilton Watch and a group of other companies Katy split off Pulsar from Hamilton and created Pulsar Time Computer Inc., with John Bergey as president. Then Katy sold 30 percent of Hamilton in 1972, and the remainder in 1974 to a Swiss company, which is now Swiss Microelectronic and Horology, better known as SMH.

Pulsar expands
Pulsar, still part of HMW, was growing handsomely. It donated 30 early watches to the Smithsonian Institution and developed a series of LED-display timepieces, including the first calculator watch and a watch that could measure your pulse and heart rate. And the company built watch modules for Hamilton and Omega timepieces. In time, Pulsar built almost 10,000 modules, about half for Hamilton watches. It sold watches to upscale outfits like Neiman Marcus and Tiffany (the largest single customer).

Meanwhile, technology marched on. Pulsar's leading LED manufacturer, Litronix, introduced a digital watch, as did many semiconductor companies-including Intel, Fairchild, National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments. As is their custom, they drove down the prices until, at bottom, TI offered a digital watch in a plastic case with a plastic band for $10.

Jewelry companies warned the semiconductor vendors that the watch was a piece of jewelry and should be marketed as such. The semiconductor companies scoffed at this advice from stuffy old-fashioned manufacturers and marched on-or, rather, marched down. They killed Pulsar, whose inventory was sold to a liquidator and whose name and patents were sold to Seiko in 1979. And they almost killed themselves.

You can now buy a Pulsar from Seiko, but not a watch with an LED display. The company does have digital watches-with liquid-crystal displays. And it sells lots of quartz watches, having developed the first quartz watch in 1969. That watch, the Seiko Astron, was somewhat more costly than many of today's quartz watches, going for $3,358, which was just a tad more expensive than a Toyota Corolla at the time, $3,134.

Meanwhile, no LED-display watches are being made. Hamilton assembles watches in the U.S. Virgin Islands and in Lancaster, Pa. And no semiconductor manufacturer makes watches.

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