We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming for a Woz and Watch Sighting

I’m covering the technical presentations from this weeks Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara but interrupt for this small observation. As I sat down this morning, I noticed that Steve Wozniak was sitting directly in front of me. I’d seen him yesterday in the audience, but I’ve no reason to interview him so I left him alone as did pretty much everyone else in the crowd, which was too bad because it was his birthday yesterday.

In any case, as he sat in front of me, I noticed that his wristwatch was a huge, black affair. GPS, I wondered? Remote-control call button for his famed Segway? Nope. It was a nixie-tube wristwatch with a 2-digit display. I found out because every time Steve put his hand to the back of his head, which was often, I saw the orange neon digits of the watch blink on.

A nixie-tube watch. How cool is that?

Turns out, the watch is from a small shop called Cathode Corner but the Analog Devices ADXL311 tilt sensor (actually a 2-axis MEMS accelerometer) that’s designed into the watch is now obsolete, so the $395 watch is out of production pending a redesign by the creator David Forbes.