Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
Raymond Chen is one of the great treasures of the web.
Of course I remember IR file sharing! And contact beaming from Palm devices.
I remember waiting for IR file sharing. It was SLOW.
Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
Since it's 2026, googling brings me nothing... had to ask Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHHzw4s5W4
For those that don’t feel like watching a video, it was the Times Datalink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
> The sketch demonstrated infrared file sharing and other mobile scenarios. Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.