Though the 1970s are of course long gone (which is in many ways, not to be regretted, although personally I remember having a pretty good time, at least once in a while) you can still experience some of the casually gleeful sense of un-hung-up mellow fun that characterized the decade at its best, in the new Accutron Computron. Like the Pulsar, the time was not continuously displayed – you pushed a button on the side of the aggressively angular case, and the time would be displayed in glowing red numerals. In 1976, Bulova, after over a decade of unquestioned technical leadership with its Accutron tuning fork movements, introduced its first LED watch: the Computron. OLD BULOVA WATCHES WORTH ANYTHING MODYou could have any color you wanted as long as it was red, and the first watch to use LEDs for its display – the Hamilton Pulsar – seemed in 1972 to represent the last word in mod and futuristic. Originally capable of emitting only infrared light, they were of no use at first for displays but in 1962, the first visible light LEDs were produced. The light-emitting diode, or LED, is a semiconductor device that was a functional replacement for the earlier, vacuum-tube based (and very bulky) Nixie tube (which has its own charm and is still in use as a niche display solution for some digital clocks). Probably the single biggest revolution in terms of aesthetics was the advent of light-emitting diode digital watches. But quartz really drove home the point that moving forward, the sizzle was going to increasingly overshadow the steak, and pursuant to offering the latest and greatest, a number of makers quickly began to get into the game of digital watches (as HODINKEE's Joe Thompson has so ably chronicled). Of course, this had already been going on in mechanical watchmaking for years – with the exception of higher end manufacture movements the industry had increasingly begun to rely on ubiquitous outsourced movements which often differed very little from each other, except in terms of relatively trivial aspects of their cosmetics. Ultra-expensive analog quartz watches may have been the order of the day for the first year or two but the rapid democratization of the technology meant that you couldn't just sell on the strength of technical prowess – and the fact that quartz movements seemed much more homogenous qualitatively than mechanical movements, really emphasized the need to more than ever, sell on novelty and design. (Ask the man who knows.) It was also an extremely fraught time for the watch industry – 1969 may have been the year that we walked on the Moon but it was also the year when another, smaller revolution took place which we now know as the Quartz Crisis. It was a time stylistically when the transgressive exuberance of the 1960s began to become more a matter of style than political stance, and when the unbridled optimism of the Summer Of Love began to give way to, perhaps, a time of greater cynicism, if not outright self-serving hedonism. Coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a sometimes nerve-wracking, sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes wacky and kitschy experience.
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