“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
That reminds me of a cool trick that not many people seem to know, you can tell north with a analog watch: http://modernsurvivalblog.com/survival-skills/how-to-use-a-w...
It worked really well.
...I'd say that modern phones with internal compasses have obsoleted this technique, but given how unreliable phone compasses are, I wonder whether I should try producing an Android version.
So now I can generally (roughly) tell the time by looking at the sun, if I'm somewhere familiar (I know where north is) - and I can generally tell where north it is by looking at the sun, if I know the time.
I suppose most people (ie, those that don't live near the poles) can tell time roughly just by how high the sun is/how long the shadows are - but it's a little tricky in most of Norway, most of the year (except maybe around noon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches#1920_Wristw...
I have a 1913 wristwatch in my collection. But, I don't seem to have time to wear that and many fine mechanical watches any more; my smartwatch is so useful I end up wearing that instead.
Sometimes I think that it is somewhat disappointing that things didn't work out the way this mid-1980s science fiction game thought they would:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nunnwt6ex5bo7e6/hand_computer.pdf?...
The "tech level" indicates which level of technology is needed for a particular piece of equipment to be available and/or normal (won't get you burned at the stake for using "magic") - in Traveller it is used to label different worlds in the universe AFAIK - with GURPS it also extends to cross-dimensinal travel, alternate realities, time travel etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-playing_game...
(I had realised it should have been from a rpg, but I kept the game term from the previous comment to avoid confusion)
So, when you say "People who wear watches as a status symbol wore elaborate mechanical ones, people that just needed time used their phones." you are wrong in the context of the time Adams was talking about. Digital was very much 'cool' back then, or at least not 'cheap' as we see it today. Also, no-one had a mobile in 1978, as they were first introduced in 1979 (and had no clock).
As for today, fashion works in cycles, and among hipsters the digital is 'in', but who really knows. We do know that the Casio F-91 is the watch of choice for IEDs and Casio admits that they sell "well" 25 years after introduction. I remember reading that the F-91 is a graduation 'gift'/shibboleth for IED school grads, but I can't find the source. I guess that earns a fair amount of street-cred or 'cool' in certain circles (of bastard child-killer terrorists). If you do see a group of people with a lot of old Casio F-91 watches, I really hope they are not company you keep!
Actually, this Q&A from one of his (amazing) talks seems to show otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0keUhMiZ44
I kept my watch. Still wear it. My Fermi estimate is that it's 100 times faster to check the time on your watch than on the phone you have to get out of your pocket. It makes a big difference.
I suspect you're greatly underestimating how quickly you can check the time with a watch on your wrist. Even if literally no thought were required, human reflexes are on the order of 200ms latency; 100x more than that would be 20 seconds. In reality, there's a conscious element and that always slows things way down. I don't think the actual effective time taken to check the time by any means at all is ever less than about a second, even if it feels faster. Maaaybe half a second if you truly don't need to move anything but your eyeballs.
On the other hand, I find that it usually takes me 3-4s to get my phone out of my pocket and check the time on it.
In other words, what's really a bad idea—that digital watches are a symptom of—is the notion that humans have a need to know the time with absolute precision. Having that information available—literally, on hand—seems to result in nothing but bad incentives (in much the same way that having access to stock-market quotes at an hourly granularity, when going long, results in nothing but bad investment decisions.)
I once read an article claiming that the invention of the bell-tower that struck once per hour was the proximate cause of people keeping 9-5 business hours, and that a lot of other things about modern labor followed from this. Whether or not this is true, I still have a vague feeling that we would be happier (and be annoyed with people for being "late" to things less) if all clocks were randomly skewed by ~15 minutes.
"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."