I remember seeing the HP-01 in BYTE. Sorry I don't remember which one off hand. But old BYTE magazines are like a trip back in time. The tech was shockingly primitive.
I love my HP-01. It is very fun to wear and use. Sometimes it gets comments. Unfortunately I cannot read it without my reading (or progressive) glasses anymore! For that, a Seiko Astron or Citizen works; angles are easier to read without glasses.
Even if the Apple Watch flew to the Moon and back all on its own, it would only be half as cool as this starship commander's watch. Did James T. Kirk wear one of these?
OR... the Internet and eBay have made watch collecting accessible and broken down a lot of the barriers to entry that used to exist, and were jealously guarded by gatekeepers. Yes, the likelihood is that most collectible watches now cost more, but the prices are probably much closer to a far value for the seller as well as the buyer due to the lessening of the huge information asymmetry that used to exist. Now, the watch you found in grandpa's attic when looking through his estate after he died can be researched and priced accurately using the Internet, and it becomes much harder for unscrupulous dealers to obtain it for peanuts.
> "Oh, these Rolex Milgauss watches with a certificate showing it was presented to your grandpa while he worked at CERN? [0] Yeah, there are loads and loads of them floating about, sorry, they're really common. If it was new, could be worth about five or six thousand pounds [1] but this is old, used and pretty well worn so probably only worth a couple of thousand quid, but I'll take it off your hands for GBP 2500.00 just to be nice, ok?"
