Timex Data Link Digital Watch
Getting your calendar appointments onto a modern smartwatch is effortless, because your always-connected smartphone shares all of that information automatically. But 27 years ago nobody had a smartphone, and Bluetooth was still mostly known as the nickname for an ancient king of Denmark and Norway, so Timex’s solution to syncing information like a phone book and calendar from a computer was the Data Link watch. It featured no wireless connectivity, but instead used an optical sensor that read data through a series of flashing bars while you held the watch up to a computer screen—an approach that sounds downright primitive.
