They could just set it to 12h mode for americans and 24h mode for the rest of the world, and hid the setting somewhere deep in the menus (hold this button for 3s, then press that button 5 times, and then the other button two times, etc.), so you could change it from american to normal display if needed, and never again press it by accident.
The fact that Casio is well aware that the backlight is just terrible, but haven't fixed it in close to 40 years is hilarious and just makes me love it even more.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
This was 1998.
It’s a little strange that a dedicated button would be needed to switch between them, especially when the math to convert between them is so simple.
You did not know that large parts of the world default to 12h time?
This is absolutely NOT an American thing. I am not American and have never lived there. I am 58 years old, British and Irish, and lived a decade in Nigeria and a decade in Czechia. I have travelled widely around Europe and can get by in 6 foreign languages.
12h time in real daily life is more common everywhere I have ever been. Only minor subsections of humanity -- military people, maybe -- work on the 24h clock.
Ooh that explains a lot.
24 hour time is used extensively in the UK. For example, all public transport uses 24 hour times here.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
I don't know what clever jiggery-pokery you are trying to do, but whatever you typed, it's just turning to tofu on this Macbook, in both Chrome and Firefox.
A few months without doing them, and it was hopeless trying to remember how to do them again.
The beauty of them is that I can pick up any casio model from any year and I know how it works.
That my friend is peak design.
15 beeps, btw, till it turns itself off for the day.
One thing I miss that’s not on my Fitbit is an hourly warning. When you have ADHD, it’s a huge helper.
Press MODE, then press ALARM ON/OFF.
Both countries have now officially switched to the 24-hour format.
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
I used to walk around with a Casio always, I would have welcomed this connectivity, but now I have a Pebble and I like the balance. Could have done without the HR monitor, and with GPS though (some features don't work without phone connection, too many I find). Other than that, perfect for me.