WHEN I STARTED work in an ad agency, we still marked up colour press ads on large boards rather than a screen and faxed the proofs to clients. If they wanted changes (and they always did), you had to literally cut and paste strips of new copy onto the boards and wrestle them through the fax again. No ⌘C and ⌘V for us. When was the last time you even saw a fax, let alone used one? The DBC- 62 databank calculator watch comes from the same period and is just about as redundant, but a lot more interesting.
If you were at school in the early 1990s you might have had one. If you were lucky and your teachers were more concerned about a coffee and a breaktime cig rather than perusing your wristwear, you might even have got away with using it nefariously in exams. This slim, black plastic case could hold 50 sets of 12 character messages and make the difference between surviving Mr Mallin’s Friday afternoon physics tests, or detention. Then, on top of that, the fourfunction calculator would coast you through double maths with minimal effort. To be fair, it took so long to enter the data using the ant-sized keys that it would have been quicker just to learn the stuff, but where would have been the fun? Today, even the cheapest phone will do everything a DBC will do and plenty more.