The Value Proposition The Delightfully Anachronistic Bulova Computron

Coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a sometimes nerve-wracking, sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes wacky and kitschy experience It was a time stylistically when the transgressive exuberance of the 1960s began to become more a matter of style than political stance, and when the unbridled optimism of the Summer Of Love began to give way to, perhaps, a time of greater cynicism, if not outright self-serving hedonism It was also an extremely fraught time for the watch industry - 1969 may have been the year that we walked on the Moon but it was also the year when another, smaller revolution took place which we now know as the Quartz Crisis.

Ultra-expensive analog quartz watches may have been the order of the day for the first year or two but the rapid democratization of the technology meant that you couldn't just sell on the strength of technical prowess - and the fact that quartz movements seemed much more homogenous qualitatively than mechanical movements, really emphasized the need to more than ever, sell on novelty and design Of course, this had already been going on in mechanical watchmaking for years - with the exception of higher end manufacture movements the industry had increasingly begun to rely on ubiquitous outsourced movements which often differed very little from each other, except in terms of relatively trivial aspects of their cosmetics Quartz really drove home the point that moving forward, the sizzle was going to increasingly overshadow the steak, and pursuant to offering the latest and greatest, a number of makers quickly began to get into the game of digital watches. Source