Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

Back in January, the wonderful blog Old Vintage Computing Research, which covers all kinds of old machines and devices, presented this bizarre “smart” watch from the early days of the World Wide Web. It didn’t connect to the internet itself; it sat in a cradle and had up to 93K (who could need more?) of precious plain-text data sent to it from a Windows 9X or 2000 machine, that you could then read “on the go,” “on the road,” “in transit,” “while sitting on a subway car sadly isolated from a web browser,” etc. This essential device would have cost you $85 at the time.

Image from the linked blog post.

Imagine trying to read approximately 20 print pages’ worth of internet text on that tiny display! For more, please click through for the device’s history and loving paens to its gross unusability.

I couldn’t let this promotional image from the device’s long-dead website go without comment though, offering “Free download from WEB”:

Image from the blog, originally from the device’s website. This bikini-wearing computer graphics lady likes her Web-@nywhere so much she got a dorky tattoo of its logo. It’ll either take an expensive operation or a simple retexturing to remove that! No one tell her she’s wearing the watch upside-down.

Old Vintage Computing Research: The Web-@nywhere Watch

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