That sure deosn't sound right. The radioactivity from watch-dial radium is not strong enough to cause any damage - background radiation in a high altitude commercial jetliner is greater. I also would not expect radiation burns on your arm to reflect the exact pattern of the watch dial, if that's what you're implying it does. You sure this baby is stock? Send me a pic if you're so inclined.
Most of those early prewar watches hade clocklike guts.
That's the first time I've heard this story about the origins of the wristwatch. What I heard was:
At the time of WWI, soldiers were carrying pocketwatches, which had been getting smaller for literally hundreds of years. In fact some small womens watches were "convertibles" that could be used as a pocketwatch or, affixed with a ribbon, worn on the wrist. Men would not wear them though, they were seen as too efffeminite.
But, for soldiers they made sense, it freed up a hand, so soldiers were forced to wear wristwaches on leather straps. When the was was over they were no longer seen as effeminite and by the end of the 1920's the wristwatch had taken over.
As far as I've been able to tell the first wristwatch was made by Alfred Lugrin (foudner of Lemania) for the Italian Navy in 18-someting.
The PDP-8 instruction set was pretty miserable, you have my sympathies. The joke used to be it had 4 instructions and one of them, "operate" did everything. They were pretty obsolete by 79.
Our high school taught us a hypothetical machine langauge in 1970 which ran on an IBM 1130. Then we graduated to FONTRAN on punched cards. During the summers a bunch of kids rewrote the OS on that pig and made it about a zillion times faster. DEC machines were a real joy to use after that mess, and DIBOL made progamming a PDP-8 sort of ok, but the real fun was when we got to use the 11's; we never looked back.
Yup, that's Dave. After Teklogix he went to work for DEC and worked on DEC-TALK and then the Alpha.
Dave is the ultimate uber-hacker and I never met anybody like him. He could talk more quickly than a country auctioneer and code even more quickly and was never wrong, ever. He works for MS now in the machine architecture group last time I talked to him about a year ago.
I understand that much of C was inspired by that instruction set.
I'm not sure inspired would be the right way to say that. C was invented a shorthand for assembler, in particular PDP-11 assembler. I'm probably just being pedantic but I think it's an important distinction.
We owe a lot to those machines, by '74 UNIX and C were available (barely) from Bell Labs but by the late summer of 76 Dave Conroy at Teklogix in Mississauga, Ontario, had written and made work the only C compiler not written by Bell Labs, which ran under RSX-11M. This became DECUS C, and then gcc.
I worked there between high school and university ; Dave taught me C to test his compiler and must have got all of about $1200 for writing it as it only took him a few weeks. It was of course written entirely in assembler.
No one would really call the PDP-11 a CISC machine. You might call it a RISC VAX however
I've always held RISC to mean "executes an instruction in a single cycle" and the PDP-11 cpu's did not work that way. The instruction set was no more reduced than any other 16 bit minicomputer of the time, it was just more powerful, sensible and orthogonal than anyyhing else.
Also, many PDP-11's were random logic and not micro-coded. The later 11's were microcoded, of course, the 11/60 being the extreme because it had a writeable control store that let you define your own micro-coded instructions."
All PDP-11 cpu's other than 11/15 and 11/20 were microcoded, only the 11/60 had a writable control store and was user microprogrammable. I never saw one - like the IBM 360/84 or/96 or something - that was also microprogrammable, you never really heard of one, ever.
It's important to remember that the entire RT-11 operating system was written entirely in MACRO-11 by some amazing software engineers who knew the PDP-11 instruction set inside and out. The result was an operating system that ran very nicely in a 4K word footprint.
RT11 was awful and made Z-80 CP/M look advanced. RSX-11M was another story but by '76 pretty much every PDP-11 at a university was running UNIX while very few if any in industry were, they used RSX-11M or RSX-11D. RT11 died out pretty quick when RSX-1M became stable around '77.
Fitting in 4K wasn't a big deal, by the mid 70s 16K was still considered pretty minimal and most machines had more, like 128K an big system might a total of say 90K used by the various tasks running in your average "big" application.
Maybe it seems that way to you by looking at it but in the time interval bewteen working on PDP-11s that cost insane amounts of somebody elses money and being able to actually (!) own a computer of my own, the 68K stuff was a little scary and stupid looking, just as the vax instruction set made you wonder if DEC has lost it's way.
I've thought a lot about how you'd improve a PDP-11 instruction set and I'm not sure you can a whole lot really. Bigger address space, larger word lenghts while preserving the smaller ones perhaps, but that's about it.
The Z80000 (not Z8000, which I've used, I'm not sure I've ever heard of an actual working Z80000 system, but on paper that seemed to me to be the one to get) wasn't a lot better but it seemed to be a bit more sane then the 68K.
But, Moto has working 32 bit silicon, and nobody picked poor Zilog and all those years of Z-80 loyalty went doen the drain.
Of course all Moto had was cpu silicon and if you were trying to build a computer to sell in the very early 80's the fact that Intel has working dma controllers, CTC's, serial and parallel ports and so on and so forth was not lost on you; Moto did't have this stuff the bastard hardware engineers everywhere stuck it to all programmers for the next lifetime by announcing they had to use the 8086.
That would be me. I did assembler programming (with some C when I could get away with it) from 1976 to about 1989 and have programmed, in assembler, almost every cpu and bitslice beast there was back then from microcontrollers to minicomputers.
Thw x86 instruction set, with it's puny number of registers was by and far the absolute worst piece of shit it's ever been my extreme displeasure to get paid to program. To add insult to injury those lame assed segment registers have been IMO, the source of more bugs than I could shake a stick it. It's hard enough to get this crap right but when you have the "oh, CS: I thoight it was DS:" nightmare it's just untenable.
I bet you could make a good case for estimating how much programmer time was wasted dicking with those stupid segment registers, and for no good reason, and come up with an insanly huge number of dollars wasted by some bad decision early on at Intel.
As one comp.arch poster put it so succinctly a long time ago:
Segments are for worms!
Looking at x86 I'm not surprised people have a fear and loathing of assembly. Assembler used to be fun, but hasn't been for decades. Bleh...
The best, as I said in another post, was the PDP-11. That was a downright elegant machine and it's no wonder C and unix are the way they are. God forbid DMR had had an Intel processor back then.
The 68K instruction set is better than most of them, although if memory serves the Z80000 was even better.
But, I still contend the best all time machine language was the PDP-11 instruction set. If anybody knws what they think was a better one I'd love to see it.
Not a problem, I've done it many times. There's a section in the law that allows people to have very small quantities of radioacrtive stuff just for this.
FYI, Radium was used on watch dials well into the 1960s.
If you have a WW I watcht at doesn't work right, get it fixed.
I have a few domains that serve merely as honeypots for whois spammers. The snailmail address is correct but the company is "The Toronto Mango Appreciation Society" and "The Shaolin Gung Fu Death Society" - stuff like that.
I get mail on a regular basis to these addresses from such companies as: IBM, Microsoft, HP, SUN, AT&T and all the other companies who have paid tens of millions of dollars to DC lobbyists to make sure the domain name system is the way they want it.
Each time year hear some DC insider proclaim "we need to know peoples real identies because of crime, child pornography and homeland security" what they really mean is "we don't want to waste our benefactors stamps".
Mikki Barry was stalked from information in the whois database, and while I havn't kept up with this too much but doesn't the whole thing run afoul if European privacy laws?
I keep hearing this complaint but I can honestly say that by introducing a couple of keywords to remove you can find what you're looking for withing seconds. At least I've never had a problem; I can't rememeber the last time I actually coudln't find what I was looking for on Google.
Google can ban you for 30 days. During that limbo your site does not appear in the indes at all. If you ask why you get a terse "website removed at webmasters request" and even most google staffers aren't told why they were removed.
> "To answer another poster's assertion that the Internet is like a car, you can't just drive, you have to have some knowledge, I'd say this: sure, you have to know how to USE the car. But you shouldn't have to be expected to understand its architecture and occasionally pull the carburetor as well."
The car analagy holds very well. If your car does something wierd and you don't know about cars you take it in for service and pay a few hundred bucks for them to diagnose the problem and replace some cheap component.
But if you know cars you can diagnose it yourself, buy the part as a fraction of the cost and install if yourself and save an absolute fortune (plus know it's done right).
In the car world dumb-asses pay for their stupidity. In the computer world they just leech off the cluefull.
I live near a small villiage way out in a rural area. You tend to end up knowing a of the people out here despite not going outside much.
"So what is it you do"
"Computers".
"OH! I have a problem with my Windows..."
"Oh, not those kind of computers, the really big ones that businesses use".
"Oh. So you have one of these big computers at your house?"
"No, I work at home but the computers are somewhere else".
"Oh, so you work over the internet... I have this prob..."
"No, I don't really use the internet, I have a special kind of satellite"
"Oh, we have a problem with our satellite what does it mean when..."
"No, not that kind of satellite, it's a special military kind. When there's a problem two guys in back suits come up and work on it.".
"You don't really work with computers do you?"
"No, I'm a farmer. I grow hydroponic basil".
"Yeah that figures. You don't know anything about computers".
Ten years ago i was telling everybody they had to get on the internet. Back then I thought it would be neat if everybody was online.
Now that they are I can only say "what the HELL was I thinking?".
When Lauren Knowlin was at the then-internic about 94-05 or so she said she'd get support calls that went like this:
"Is this the Network Information Center?"
"Yes, this is the Internic, how can I help you?"
"My mouse doesn't work".
"I'm sorry but that's really not what we do, we..."
"But I'm connected to the network, aren't you the Network Information Center... is says you are"
"Yes but that's not really what we..."
"Look, I'm conncted to the neteork and I need information on how to fix my mouse..."
And you wondered why you couldn't get through to the NIC back then.
It's always bothered me that people with a clue can't get tech support for anything these days because they've dumbed down the whole process for the drag'n'drool imbeciles. I've often thought we need the equivalent of the grocery store checkout counter; somewhere you can call or email if you know what you're doing anf can keep it short.
I began collecting watches 25 years ago when the $175 Seiko (and that was half price) I got screwed up badly. I bought an weird old Bulova in a pawn shop for $20, carefully scraped the blobs of white paint off it, then wore it for 7 years before finding a differnt old watch I liked better. I have maybe a dozen of this model now, the curvexes made between 1938 and 1945 but still have that pawn shop special and it still works.
Sadly, Bulova made so many of these things they'll never have tremendous (four figure) collectible value, but if you were to try to replace it with something modern that has that good of a movement, finished that well, in a gold case, it would cost you tens or even hundreds of time more that what you'd pay for one of these.
The stuff Bulova sells today, like almost every other great brand from the past is mosly cheap very high volume Asian junk, not the Swiss stuff from days of yore.
I'd need to see proof of that. It seems to me that make too many of those things to have any collectable value.
Even a modern classic, like say, a current Omega Speedmaster has dubious apprection potential - whereas the original 1957 Mark I version has gone from $400 to $4000 in eight years (and was well under $100 new)
If you want a watch to tell time, buy any $2 or $30 job and when it needs a new battery just buy a new watch.
But, you probably don't need a watch. Your cel phone, car, coffee pot, desk phone, computer(s), microwave, car and God knows what else all tell time for you.
So why do people still buy watches? Status and adornment. Plus there's that collecting thing. Essentially they're either bought for the jewellry value (hey, is jewellry obsolete?) or for the complicated mechanics inside them - the "movement" as the guts are called.
If you look at the numbers from the Swiss luxury good sector they're staggering in both volume of units shipped and price and the average price is increasing. A "decent" watch can barely be had for under a grand. A "good" watch starts at five grand and it just goes up: 10K, 30K, 80K, 250K... whatever you want to spend. Wanna spend millions? No problem, how bout a vintage Patek repating moohphase chrono pocketwatch. One of three made went for something like $13 million at auction setting a new records. Obsolete? You bet. That's sorta the point. But, we're dealing with extrinsic worth here, not intrinsic value or marginal utility.
The watch thing isn't about telling time for the most part. The in-joke in the watch crowd ia a "watch idiot savant" or "WIS": a guy that stares at his watch for an hour but deosn't know what time it is. He's staring at the dial, the applied markers, the hands, what have you. The watch as art might be a good way of thinking about this.
The attraction is a tiny case with up to hundreds of parts in it that all do something and are probably very highly finished, shiney and damn near pefect. And like Lays chips... you probbaly can't stop at one. So, if this bug bites you (phear this!) you'll probbaly up with, uh, quite a few. It is a sickness, no cure is desired.
I'm currently wearing a 60's Rodania Valjoux Caliber 72 chrono [1] and have no use for quartz gizmotronic fluff. I use the chronograph at least once a day and bottom line: mechanical ones are still more reliable and servicable than quartz ones and are cheaper to fix. In 50 years I'll still be able to get parts for this watch. In 10 years getting a quartz module for a Movado will almost certainly be impossible - it's merely "extremely difficult" at the moment.
I suspect the author of the referenced article doesn't know much about watches.
Slashdot Mirror
That sure deosn't sound right. The radioactivity from watch-dial radium is not strong enough to cause any damage - background radiation in a high altitude commercial jetliner is greater. I also would not expect radiation burns on your arm to reflect the exact pattern of the watch dial, if that's what you're implying it does. You sure this baby is stock? Send me a pic if you're so inclined.
Most of those early prewar watches hade clocklike guts.
That's the first time I've heard this story about the origins of the wristwatch. What I heard was:
At the time of WWI, soldiers were carrying pocketwatches, which had been getting smaller for literally hundreds of years. In fact some small womens watches were "convertibles" that could be used as a pocketwatch or, affixed with a ribbon, worn on the wrist. Men would not wear them though, they were seen as too efffeminite.
But, for soldiers they made sense, it freed up a hand, so soldiers were forced to wear wristwaches on leather straps. When the was was over they were no longer seen as effeminite and by the end of the 1920's the wristwatch had taken over.
As far as I've been able to tell the first wristwatch was made by Alfred Lugrin (foudner of Lemania) for the Italian Navy in 18-someting.
You're thinking of quartz watches, son. Real watches tick.
> "Making pornography isn't like it's an honest job or enterprise."
No, you're quite right, they should quit, join the military and kill people instead.
If your geek has a girlfriend he doesn't need a present too. Buy chocolate for yourself.
The PDP-8 instruction set was pretty miserable, you have my sympathies. The joke used to be it had 4 instructions and one of them, "operate" did everything. They were pretty obsolete by 79.
Our high school taught us a hypothetical machine langauge in 1970 which ran on an IBM 1130. Then we graduated to FONTRAN on punched cards. During the summers a bunch of kids rewrote the OS on that pig and made it about a zillion times faster. DEC machines were a real joy to use after that mess, and DIBOL made progamming a PDP-8 sort of ok, but the real fun was when we got to use the 11's; we never looked back.
Yup, that's Dave. After Teklogix he went to work for DEC and worked on DEC-TALK and then the Alpha.
Dave is the ultimate uber-hacker and I never met anybody like him. He could talk more quickly than a country auctioneer and code even more quickly and was never wrong, ever. He works for MS now in the machine architecture group last time I talked to him about a year ago.
I understand that much of C was inspired by that instruction set.
I'm not sure inspired would be the right way to say that. C was invented a shorthand for assembler, in particular PDP-11 assembler. I'm probably just being pedantic but I think it's an important distinction.
We owe a lot to those machines, by '74 UNIX and C were available (barely) from Bell Labs but by the late summer of 76 Dave Conroy at Teklogix in Mississauga, Ontario, had written and made work the only C compiler not written by Bell Labs, which ran under RSX-11M. This became DECUS C, and then gcc.
I worked there between high school and university ; Dave taught me C to test his compiler and must have got all of about $1200 for writing it as it only took him a few weeks. It was of course written entirely in assembler.
No one would really call the PDP-11 a CISC machine. You might call it a RISC VAX however
/96 or something - that was also microprogrammable, you never really heard of one, ever.
I've always held RISC to mean "executes an instruction in a single cycle" and the PDP-11 cpu's did not work that way. The instruction set was no more reduced than any other 16 bit minicomputer of the time, it was just more powerful, sensible and orthogonal than anyyhing else.
Also, many PDP-11's were random logic and not micro-coded. The later 11's were microcoded, of course, the 11/60 being the extreme because it had a writeable control store that let you define your own micro-coded instructions."
All PDP-11 cpu's other than 11/15 and 11/20 were microcoded, only the 11/60 had a writable control store and was user microprogrammable. I never saw one - like the IBM 360/84 or
It's important to remember that the entire RT-11 operating system was written entirely in MACRO-11 by some amazing software engineers who knew the PDP-11 instruction set inside and out. The result was an operating system that ran very nicely in a 4K word footprint.
RT11 was awful and made Z-80 CP/M look advanced. RSX-11M was another story but by '76 pretty much every PDP-11 at a university was running UNIX while very few if any in industry were, they used RSX-11M or RSX-11D. RT11 died out pretty quick when RSX-1M became stable around '77.
Fitting in 4K wasn't a big deal, by the mid 70s 16K was still considered pretty minimal and most machines had more, like 128K an big system might a total of say 90K used by the various tasks running in your average "big" application.
Maybe it seems that way to you by looking at it but in the time interval bewteen working on PDP-11s that cost insane amounts of somebody elses money and being able to actually (!) own a computer of my own, the 68K stuff was a little scary and stupid looking, just as the vax instruction set made you wonder if DEC has lost it's way.
I've thought a lot about how you'd improve a PDP-11 instruction set and I'm not sure you can a whole lot really. Bigger address space, larger word lenghts while preserving the smaller ones perhaps, but that's about it.
The Z80000 (not Z8000, which I've used, I'm not sure I've ever heard of an actual working Z80000 system, but on paper that seemed to me to be the one to get) wasn't a lot better but it seemed to be a bit more sane then the 68K.
But, Moto has working 32 bit silicon, and nobody picked poor Zilog and all those years of Z-80 loyalty went doen the drain.
Of course all Moto had was cpu silicon and if you were trying to build a computer to sell in the very early 80's the fact that Intel has working dma controllers, CTC's, serial and parallel ports and so on and so forth was not lost on you; Moto did't have this stuff the bastard hardware engineers everywhere stuck it to all programmers for the next lifetime by announcing they had to use the 8086.
(waves)Hi!(waves)
That would be me. I did assembler programming (with some C when I could get away with it) from 1976 to about 1989 and have programmed, in assembler, almost every cpu and bitslice beast there was back then from microcontrollers to minicomputers.
Thw x86 instruction set, with it's puny number of registers was by and far the absolute worst piece of shit it's ever been my extreme displeasure to get paid to program. To add insult to injury those lame assed segment registers have been IMO, the source of more bugs than I could shake a stick it. It's hard enough to get this crap right but when you have the "oh, CS: I thoight it was DS:" nightmare it's just untenable.
I bet you could make a good case for estimating how much programmer time was wasted dicking with those stupid segment registers, and for no good reason, and come up with an insanly huge number of dollars wasted by some bad decision early on at Intel.
As one comp.arch poster put it so succinctly a long time ago:
Segments are for worms!
Looking at x86 I'm not surprised people have a fear and loathing of assembly. Assembler used to be fun, but hasn't been for decades. Bleh...
The best, as I said in another post, was the PDP-11. That was a downright elegant machine and it's no wonder C and unix are the way they are. God forbid DMR had had an Intel processor back then.
The 68K instruction set is better than most of them, although if memory serves the Z80000 was even better.
But, I still contend the best all time machine language was the PDP-11 instruction set. If anybody knws what they think was a better one I'd love to see it.
Not a problem, I've done it many times. There's a section in the law that allows people to have very small quantities of radioacrtive stuff just for this.
FYI, Radium was used on watch dials well into the 1960s.
If you have a WW I watcht at doesn't work right, get it fixed.
Sure, but compared to other things you may have spent $100 on back then - a vacuum cleaner, tires etc, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Not many utilitiarian things you buy hold even a fraction of their value a year later.
How bout them 286's?
DNS is a way to identify computers on a network. We don't need a better more secure identd to associate names with numbers.
I have a few domains that serve merely as honeypots for whois spammers. The snailmail address is correct but the company is "The Toronto Mango Appreciation Society" and "The Shaolin Gung Fu Death Society" - stuff like that.
I get mail on a regular basis to these addresses from such companies as: IBM, Microsoft, HP, SUN, AT&T and all the other companies who have paid tens of millions of dollars to DC lobbyists to make sure the domain name system is the way they want it.
Each time year hear some DC insider proclaim "we need to know peoples real identies because of crime, child pornography and homeland security" what they really mean is "we don't want to waste our benefactors stamps".
Mikki Barry was stalked from information in the whois database, and while I havn't kept up with this too much but doesn't the whole thing run afoul if European privacy laws?
I keep hearing this complaint but I can honestly say that by introducing a couple of keywords to remove you can find what you're looking for withing seconds. At least I've never had a problem; I can't rememeber the last time I actually coudln't find what I was looking for on Google.
You've just explained, to anybody that has figured out what google wants, why you're doing badly.
Google can ban you for 30 days. During that limbo your site does not appear in the indes at all. If you ask why you get a terse "website removed at webmasters request" and even most google staffers aren't told why they were removed.
> "To answer another poster's assertion that the Internet is like a car, you can't just drive, you have to have some knowledge, I'd say this: sure, you have to know how to USE the car. But you shouldn't have to be expected to understand its architecture and occasionally pull the carburetor as well."
The car analagy holds very well. If your car does something wierd and you don't know about cars you take it in for service and pay a few hundred bucks for them to diagnose the problem and replace some cheap component.
But if you know cars you can diagnose it yourself, buy the part as a fraction of the cost and install if yourself and save an absolute fortune (plus know it's done right).
In the car world dumb-asses pay for their stupidity. In the computer world they just leech off the cluefull.
This one.
I live near a small villiage way out in a rural area. You tend to end up knowing a of the people out here despite not going outside much.
"So what is it you do"
"Computers".
"OH! I have a problem with my Windows..."
"Oh, not those kind of computers, the really big ones that businesses use".
"Oh. So you have one of these big computers at your house?"
"No, I work at home but the computers are somewhere else".
"Oh, so you work over the internet... I have this prob..."
"No, I don't really use the internet, I have a special kind of satellite"
"Oh, we have a problem with our satellite what does it mean when..."
"No, not that kind of satellite, it's a special military kind. When there's a problem two guys in back suits come up and work on it.".
"You don't really work with computers do you?"
"No, I'm a farmer. I grow hydroponic basil".
"Yeah that figures. You don't know anything about
computers".
Ten years ago i was telling everybody they had to get on the internet. Back then I thought it would be neat if everybody was online.
Now that they are I can only say "what the HELL was I thinking?".
When Lauren Knowlin was at the then-internic about 94-05 or so she said she'd get support calls that went like this:
"Is this the Network Information Center?"
"Yes, this is the Internic, how can I help you?"
"My mouse doesn't work".
"I'm sorry but that's really not what we do, we..."
"But I'm connected to the network, aren't you the Network Information Center... is says you are"
"Yes but that's not really what we..."
"Look, I'm conncted to the neteork and I need information on how to fix my mouse..."
And you wondered why you couldn't get through to the NIC back then.
It's always bothered me that people with a clue can't get tech support for anything these days because they've dumbed down the whole process for the drag'n'drool imbeciles. I've often thought we need the equivalent of the grocery store checkout counter; somewhere you can call or email if you know what you're doing anf can keep it short.
I began collecting watches 25 years ago when the $175 Seiko (and that was half price) I got screwed up badly. I bought an weird old Bulova in a pawn shop for $20, carefully scraped the blobs of white paint off it, then wore it for 7 years before finding a differnt old watch I liked better. I have maybe a dozen of this model now, the curvexes made between 1938 and 1945 but still have that pawn shop special and it still works.
Sadly, Bulova made so many of these things they'll never have tremendous (four figure) collectible value, but if you were to try to replace it with something modern that has that good of a movement, finished that well, in a gold case, it would cost you tens or even hundreds of time more that what you'd pay for one of these.
The stuff Bulova sells today, like almost every other great brand from the past is mosly cheap very high volume Asian junk, not the Swiss stuff from days of yore.
And hey, what says "geek" more than an a Bulova Accutron spaceview?
I'd need to see proof of that. It seems to me that make too many of those things to have any collectable value.
Even a modern classic, like say, a current Omega Speedmaster has dubious apprection potential - whereas the original 1957 Mark I version has gone from $400 to $4000 in eight years (and was well under $100 new)
If you want a watch to tell time, buy any $2 or $30 job and when it needs a new battery just buy a new watch.
But, you probably don't need a watch. Your cel phone, car, coffee pot, desk phone, computer(s), microwave, car and God knows what else all tell time for you.
So why do people still buy watches? Status and adornment. Plus there's that collecting thing. Essentially they're either bought for the jewellry value (hey, is jewellry obsolete?) or for the complicated mechanics inside them - the "movement" as the guts are called.
If you look at the numbers from the Swiss luxury good sector they're staggering in both volume of units shipped and price and the average price is increasing. A "decent" watch can barely be had for under a grand. A "good" watch starts at five grand and it just goes up: 10K, 30K, 80K, 250K... whatever you want to spend. Wanna spend millions? No problem, how bout a vintage Patek repating moohphase chrono pocketwatch. One of three made went for something like $13 million at auction setting a new records. Obsolete? You bet. That's sorta the point. But, we're dealing with extrinsic worth here, not intrinsic value or marginal utility.
The watch thing isn't about telling time for the most part. The in-joke in the watch crowd ia a "watch idiot savant" or "WIS": a guy that stares at his watch for an hour but deosn't know what time it is. He's staring at the dial, the applied markers, the hands, what have you. The watch as art might be a good way of thinking about this.
The attraction is a tiny case with up to hundreds of parts in it that all do something and are probably very highly finished, shiney and damn near pefect. And like Lays chips... you probbaly can't stop at one. So, if this bug bites you (phear this!) you'll probbaly up with, uh, quite a few. It is a sickness, no cure is desired.
I'm currently wearing a 60's Rodania Valjoux Caliber 72 chrono [1] and have no use for quartz gizmotronic fluff. I use the chronograph at least once a day and bottom line: mechanical ones are still more reliable and servicable than quartz ones and are cheaper to fix. In 50 years I'll still be able to get parts for this watch. In 10 years getting a quartz module for a Movado will almost certainly be impossible - it's merely "extremely difficult" at the moment.
I suspect the author of the referenced article doesn't know much about watches.
[1] You'll need to go to http://support.open-rsc.org/ to be able to see this.