Little Blue People

Little Blue People

I can be pretty clever. Take this summer for example. I knew my wife wanted to clean the garage together, but I was clever enough to avoid it all summer long. As I was relishing in my ability to procrastinate, she blind sided me and said last week “It’s still warm enough, let’s do it!”

I hate cleaning the garage, but it is always fun to find something in a box whose memory was long ago pushed down the stack. You know, the one in the box that you told your wife you didn’t need to go through because you “knew every single thing that was in there”?

Well, I found just such a treasure this last weekend! A Sony Watchman. That’s right, not the Walkman — this was the first hand-held television. I turned it over and it proclaimed “Manufactured 1987”. Wow…I wonder what this would bring on eBay? It must be really rare!

I turned it on, but no joy. Optimistically, I replaced the batteries and tried again. Voila! Static noise. I extended the antenna and tuned the analog dial(!), knowing I wouldn’t receive anything, but interestingly enough, at least one station in Portland is still broadcasting an analog signal and there it was…in vivid black and white (well, navy and powder blue), 1 ½” across. Twenty-two years after manufacture and it was still working like it just came out of the box. Talk about clever? How about the folks that designed these things?

Now I’m getting giddy. I say to my wife “Honey…how many of these could still exist…and be working!?! I’m sure a museum will want it from me!”

She wasn’t quite as excited. She also wasn’t quite as eloquent as I was either: “Uh huh.”

So…heck with her. I’ll probably be picking out a new boat with the money I’m going to make on this rare gem…this stone knife of the electronics industry!

As soon as my sentence in the garage was commuted, I made my way upstairs and pointed Google Chrome to eBay. I did a search for “Watchman”. WHAT? There were dozens listed…some with ZERO bids despite being listed for…no way…$5.00?

Well, these must not be working….maybe there aren’t any listed! As I peruse the listings, the obvious sinks over me like the balloon at the end of Richard Heene’s hoax. All of these work. They are plentiful, and worse, uncollectable. My spirits sink.

Then my mind goes into that primal “engineer” mode, and begins wandering.

Did Sony engineers have any idea that these devices — early portable electronics, without the techniques we’ve developed to make the rugged devices of today — would be operational in the truckloads more than 20 years after they first put them into production?

Did the PCB designers think about exceeding two decades with the design? Did anyone really think the connectors and that tiny CRT would take the abuse and the nasty environment that those years would bring? I mean, my Watchman has been sitting under my dad’s 1948 baseball glove in a box in a damp garage in the Pacific Northwest for years!

Or, is it precisely because they did consider building their product with that kind of life expectancy that it did become a classic. My bet is that they did. It’s also clear that this was a collaborative design; there is simply no way they could have miniaturized the product to this degree without intense communications between electronic design, mechanical design, PCB design, and manufacturing. This product, sitting in a box in my garage, was incredibly forward looking in its design. (After writing that, I’m really tempted to take it apart…)

Do you think that far into the future with your designs? Should you?

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