Abacus Watch

There are two sorts of watch displays out there, and both of them have been around since time immemorial without much of a competition. Firstly was the anologue style with moving hands. Then as the population lost IQ points by the barrowful, the digital readout became the popular choice. No longer did one have to figure out what the position of those two little spikes meant, they could just read the numbers. Bugger that Big Ben never converted.

Anyhow, we should return to the way of our ancestors and hone our code reading skills. Rather than two hands on a dial, or an apathetic numerical readout, I propose a dot matrix in the form of an abacus. Display could be LCD or mechanical (with a bit more engineering in there for all the tiny moving parts).

Display would be a 12x12 grid. The bottom 5 rows would denote the seconds, each row counting by 12's. As 12 seconds count off the first row, the second row begins to count off and so on until the whole lot has reached 60. At that point, one bead from the minutes section gets ticked and the seconds reset. This continues for an hour, at which point another 5 rows have all traversed their beady paths. One hour bead is then slid over and the minutes start over. There would be 2 rows of 12 for the hours, keeping it in military time. If the first row is all lit up, you immediately know that it is post meridian.

So, for example, 8:56:13 am would look thusly:

oooooooooooo
xxxxxxxxoooo
============
xxxxxxxxoooo
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
============
oooooooooooo
oooooooooooo
oooooooooooo
xooooooooooo
xxxxxxxxxxxx

Simple, eh?