Before there were smartwatches, there were complicated watches which ran on circuit boards, chips, and a rudimentary operating system.

The Casio G-Shock had been at the forefront of this, joining the band of Japanese electronics companies that managed to marry art and electronics with some of the weirdest, most convoluted — and yet fascinating and eye-opening gadgets that would go on to change our lives forever.

If you see watches lying around like a G-Shock don’t dismiss it as being obsolete and irrelevant just yet. Pick it up and turn it over. Look at the module number at the back plate, search for the manual on the web. Get to know it a little bit.

You’re about to give a cool timepiece a worthwhile chance.

If what you have is the real thing, you’ll be able to follow that user manual — and you should — as a guide to fiddle with the settings you’d never know was possible in a watch before sophisticated semiconductor technology gave us stuff like the Apple Watch — itself we have accepted as consumers with much enthusiasm despite the glaring disadvantage of its virtual irreparability, higher levels of fragility, and a much shorter timeline to obsolescence.

Though not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I have a considerable knack for timepieces. I don’t discriminate between manual, automatic, or quartz — they’re all great. I love to pieces my cheap Timex Weekender that I picked-out on my own and bought on my own paycheck — I still use it as my “daily driver” and it beats a ton of watches in terms of looks, quality, and value for money ratio — just as much as I love my Citizen automatic that was gifted to me.

They are all fascinating feats of “microtech”. Look at it in such a way: these things as your “not-smartwatches”, your “not-smartphones”, your “not-smart… anything” — the sweet spot between tangible forms (analog) of human expression and the increasing silver-platter “metaphysical automationism” (digital) that current tech is setting our lives up for today.

You might just arrive at a new found love for that old “low-tech” gadget you’ve been ignoring.

Then you would realize — you’ve never had so many cool things with “priceless” written on its price tag.

Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash.