Some tangentially related trivia: in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams writes:
"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
My interpretation of this was that digital watches are such simple technology that the fact we like them means we are easily impressed.
His thesis was much deeper though and I have since found multiple accounts of his explaining that, at the same time as everyone was excited about the fact that pie charts could be produced to easily visualise data on a personal computer, we were also removing what is essentially a pie chart from our wrists and replacing it with something numerical. Here it is straight from the horses mouth:
That's wonderful, thanks for sharing: Adams is extremely cunning in his satirical look at the humanity.
Not that I agree: "pie charts" for tracking time (and otherwise) are useful when you need to roughly and quickly compare how much time is left in a day.
But we have since moved to it being important if something happens in 14:37 or 14:42, which is hard and slow to decipher on a pie chart.
Now, one could argue we are primitive if we have moved in that direction instead of being more lax with time instead.
I rather enjoyed the video essay Technology Connections did about the seemingly different mental models of tracking time that come from analog and digital clocks, and how a lot of people now have barely ever experienced analog clocks.
After a decade or two of not wearing watches, and always looking at my laptop or phone for the time, analogue stopped making sense to me. I recently got a gorgeous casio lineage radio controlled (and solar powered) analogue watch, so I had to relearn telling the time!
Like Technology Connections says, the minute hand is a progress bar, but I found I got confused about the hour hand. It points at, apparently, 5 o'clock, but it's actually 4:55, because the hand just doesn't line up so precisely in the visual field. A watch with just the hour hand would be less accurate, but less confusing.
I since found out about jump hour watches, that display the current hour as a digit (in a little window like you see for the date) and have a minute hand. That makes more sense to me.
I was convinced that it was because at the time h2g2 was written, "digital watches" were actually LED watches, which required that the user press a button to see the time displayed for a few seconds! (also the case for some of the first LCD models)
low power LCD watches were popularised in the early 80s
"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
My interpretation of this was that digital watches are such simple technology that the fact we like them means we are easily impressed.
His thesis was much deeper though and I have since found multiple accounts of his explaining that, at the same time as everyone was excited about the fact that pie charts could be produced to easily visualise data on a personal computer, we were also removing what is essentially a pie chart from our wrists and replacing it with something numerical. Here it is straight from the horses mouth:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=P0keUhMiZ44