This is my new watch. If you ever owned a Commodore 64 or an Amiga, you recognize that insignia below the display: It belongs to Commodore, the company that sold vast quantities of personal computers in the 1980s before petering out in the early 1990s.

My new watch is also an old watch: It’s a Commodore Time Master, manufactured in 1976 or thereabouts. I bought it from a specialist called LED Watch Stop, which has a supply of new-old-stock Time Masters that never got sold back in the 1970s. (It’s selling them for $229 apiece at the moment, although the price was $129 just a few days ago–I guess I lucked into a sale when I impulsively ordered one.)

The Time Master is an LED watch, using battery-hogging display technology that forces you to press a button on the right side to see the time. (I faked the LED readout in the photo above.) It’s especially unwieldy for southpaws such as me, since it’s hard to reach the button without covering the screen with your palm. And to save money, it uses a dinky LED with a magnifier, resulting in a display that’s impossible to read unless you look at it straight on.

On the plus side, the watch seems to keep good time, and it’s a heck of a geek conversation piece. (Until now, I sort of assumed that my Amiga 500, which I got in 1987, would be the last Commodore product I’d ever own and use.)

A Hamilton digital-watch prototype, as seen in Popular Science in 1970.

When Commodore starred making watches in 1975, it was a calculator company, not a computer maker: Its first PCs, the Kim-1 and PET 2001, didn’t come along until 1976 and 1977, respectively. And it did indeed make watches rather than slapping its name on no-name ones imported from Asia–its early models, in fact, were assembled in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mine’s a later version assembled in France; still later variants used technologies from Micro Display Systems and Frontier Semiconductor,  startups acquired by Commodore.

The company entered the watch field when digital watches were still a newfangled wonder, having debuted when Hamilton released its first Pulsar in 1972. That model sold for $2100, which was more than a new Ford Pinto went for at the time. By the time Commodore released its first models three years later, digitals had become mass-market items. The company was part of a great price plunge, much as it would be in the 1980s as the Commodore 64 went from its starting price of $595 to selling for under a hundred bucks.

Patent drawing for HP's HP-01 calculator watch.

And some of the companies which Commodore competed with during the digital watch craze would be the same ones which would be major players once the PC revolution got underway a few years later.

Intel, for instance, had bought watchmaker Microma in 1972, when digital models were still high-ticket items and the market for its microprocessors barely existed; Micromas were some of the first consumer products with Intel Inside. (They also had LCD displays that didn’t make you press a button to see the time.) At the high end, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-01, an amazing $650 calculator watch with 28 minuscule buttons you had to press with a tiny stylus. On the low end, Texas Instruments helped to knock the price of digital watches down to $10 by flooding the market with plasticky models.

Sinclair's Black Watch.

Then there was 1975′s Black Watch, from British gizmo-designing legend Clive Sinclair. A $29.95 DIY kit, it even looked a tad like a dinky version of  his slablike ZX-80 computer, introduced five years later.

In short, the 1970s watch business was a preview of the 1980s PC business. For the first time, a bunch of electronics companies which had previously specialized in scientific equipment and business machines started learning about selling gadgets to consumers. In fact, digital watch manufacturers marketed their products as computing devices. Hamilton claimed the first Pulsar was a “Time Computer.” thinking it a sexier category than “wristwatch.”  HP called its 01 a “personal information instrument,” as if it were trying to invent the PDA a decade and a half before PDAs actually came to be.

Still, by the time the 01 came out in 1977 there were signs that the digital-watch business was destined to become a dreary commodity industry. Commodore LED watches not too different from my Time Master, for instance, were being offered as a $7.99 premium to people who sent in box tops from Hunt’s Snack Pack canned pudding, which is probably not what Commodore had in mind when it became a watchmaker.

All of the soon-to-be-PC-companies’ forays into the watch business had unhappy endings. Discouraged by the HP-01′s sales, HP killed a successor called the HP-02. (Today, the 01 goes for big bucks on eBay.) The Black Watch had so many problems–it ran at different speeds in different temperatures and the batteries sometimes exploded–that it nearly drove Sinclair into bankruptcy.

Microma watches with Intel 5830 microcircuits, as seen in Intel's 1975 annual report.

In 1978, Intel sold its watch designs to Timex and the Microma name to a Swiss company. It had taken such a beating on the whole effort that cofounder Gordon Moore continued to wear a Microma watch for years to remind himself not to do anything so foolish again Texas Instruments held on a bit longer, but called it quits in 1981.

And Commodore? Well, I’m not sure when it sold its last timepiece. But in Commodore: A Company on the Edge, Brian Bagnall says that the company brought watches to the 1981 Consumer Electronics Show but didn’t have much luck with them. “The Commodore name,” he explains, “was not one people associated with watches.”

Motorola's TI-powered Motoactv sports watch.

The timing of all this failure turned out to be fortuitous. It let the companies in question refocus their energies on the emerging PC market. While that too turned out to be a cutthroat business, it had staying power. TI didn’t fare too well, but Commodore did for a time, and Intel and HP are still at it in 2012. Even if watches had sold better, they would have been a distraction.

Then again, in the technology industry it’s always a mistake to declare any product category to be permanently dead. Thanks to products such as WIMM and Motorola’s Motoactv, which pack smartphone-like power and run sophisticated apps, digital watches are intriguing again in a way they haven’t been in decades. The Motoactv even uses a Texas Instruments OMAP chip, making it a very, very distant descendant of the watches that TI sold in the 1970s.  And the notion of Intel and HP getting back into watches, in one way or another, isn’t the least bit kooky.

There’s even a modern-day Commodore selling a Intel-based Commodore 64. It would have every right to start hawking watches, I suppose. But unless its timepieces, like my Time Master, are custom-designed products based on the company’s own technologies and components, I won’t be tempted. We Commodore watch owners, you see, tend to be kind of snobbish.

View “4004!” slideshow.

On November 15th, 1971–forty years ago this Tuesday–Intel publicly unveiled the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, the 4004. It was a modest start to what would become a grand silicon empire led by Intel. So modest, in fact, that many would quickly forget the 4004 as Intel churned out more powerful chips throughout the rest of the 1970s–the predecessors of the ones inside every current Windows PC and Mac.

Few commercial products used the 4004. Let’s rediscover seven of them, and learn about the chip’s history along the way.

Let’s start with Dell; I go to dell.com and search for a laptop. I want something like a 13″ MacBook Air, so I tick “11 to 14 inches” and “< 5 lbs,” Dell’s ultralight category. I get back three largely indistinguishable machines, ranging from $999 to $1359. What’s the difference between them all? I don’t know, they all look like variants of the “Alienware M11x.” It’s confusing and overwhelming, not helpful.

It’s even worse if I just browse without searching. The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too. So maybe I want a Z Series? But the only line that apparently matches my broad search criteria—lightweight, 11-14″—I wouldn’t even consider because I don’t want a “gaming” laptop, and so I’m never going to click Alienware!

Is this the best way to sell laptops? Create a bunch of categories with arbitrary, overlapping labels, and just hope that buyers manage to fight through the system to find something that isn’t wretched?

For now, I just want to talk about the name. It’s snappy, as far as jargon goes, but it also leaves me feeling cold. The tech industry is littered with marketing buzzwords for new kinds of computers, but not all of them stick, and as history shows, you just can’t force this kind of thing.

Consider, for example, the Ultra-Mobile Personal Computer, or UMPC. Microsoft bestowed this name upon a category of tiny PCs that were supposed to become as ubiquitous as cell phones. But they were slow and outrageously expensive — Samsung’s Q1 cost $1,099 — and now they’re history.

More recently, Qualcomm tried to push the “Smartbook,” like a netbook but thinner and more power-efficient. Last year, ARM was blaming Adobe Flash for delays in bringing smartbooks to market. These little laptops were nowhere to be seen at CES 2011.

I wanted to compare these examples to netbooks and smartphones, but I can’t put a finger on how these two terms successfully entered the mainstream. What I can say is that when Nokia announced the Communicator 9000 in 1997, no one used the term “smartphone.” Ditto for the word “netbook” when Asus announced the Eee PC in 2007. The products came first, then came the jargon. It’s a cautionary tale as Intel foists the Ultrabook name on the tech world without any examples on the market.

As I’ve said before, I like what Intel is doing in terms of the actual product. People are going to prefer thinner, lighter laptops over clunky power hogs, as long as performance is sufficient. But that sounds like more of a philosophy than a specific product. If these things occupy 40 percent of the notebook market by the end of 2012, as Intel expects, shouldn’t we just be calling them “laptops?”

Ultra-low voltage, or ULV, refers to a range of processors that are more powerful than Intel’s netbook-centric Atom while retaining excellent battery life and allowing for slim figures. (I’m typing on an ULV laptop now, an Asus UL80vt.)

These thin-and-light ULV laptops were pricey when Intel introduced them a couple years ago, and they quickly earned niche status instead of mainstream success. Still, they offer what a lot of people are looking for in a computer — moderate performance and strong battery life in a lightweight frame — and pricing has come down. The company has already launched low-voltage versions of its Core i3, i5 and i7 processors

So it makes sense for Intel to give ULV a bigger role in its lineup. Whereas the the power draw for Intel’s chips previously centered around 35 watts, the company plans to set the center point around 10 or 15 watts, with the goal of making 10-hour battery life a reality for most machines.

On a recent trip to Best Buy, I was surprised by how chunky most laptops look, even compared to my 18-month-old machine. If Intel and PC makers can deliver lots of ultra-thin ULV laptops in the coveted $600 price range, the dreary old laptop could start to look exciting once again.

Dell's new XPS 15

Release dates for Dell’s refreshed XPS laptops have turned into a moving target, and all the specs haven’t been quite clear. Yet Dell on Tuesday suddenly announced immediate US availability for both the 15- and 17-inch models, along with a finalized feature set that now officially includes 3D video.

In a Dell press briefing session I attended during CES in January, Alison Gardner, a Dell product manager, sketched out new features for “AV enthusiasts”–such as JBL speakers and MAXXAudio 3–and for “immersive multimedia.”

Dell asked reporters to hold off on publishing stories about the new notebooks pending a formal announcement then slated for February 20. Yet Dell’s Lionel Menchaca detailed some preliminary specs–for the XPS 17 only–in a blog posted on Dell’s Web site, also during the week of CES.

Sure enough, while Dell’s formal announcement on February 20 didn’t happen, a follow-up blog post by Menchaca on February 22 made it clear that both the XPS 17 and XPS 15 will indeed offer previously outlined features such as Sandy Bridge Dual Core i3/i5/i7 processors; NVidia Optimus graphics options for the i7 versions; USB 3.0 ports; Skype-certified HD Webcams; a “full Stage experience” on all panels; and the aforementioned high-end audio.

In his post on Tuesday, Menchaca added some new information to the previously intimated facts about XPS. Somewhat vaguely, he mentioned support for “a range of Sandy Bridge or Huron River CPU options: i3/i5/i7. Dual core and Quad core.” Huron River, Intel’s mobile platform, integrates Sandy Bridge, but the two are not one and the same.

Menchaca also spoke on Tuesday of a new panel on the 17-inch model that “brings 3D capability with a 1920-by-1080 screen.”  When used with the new optionally available 1920-by-1080 screen and a 3GB NVidia GeForce GT 555, the XPS 17 can deliver “new levels of performance in 2D and especially 3D gaming, and beyond,” according to the Dell blogger.

In a statement e-mailed to me soon afterward that same day, a Dell spokesperson dubbed the XPS 17 “the first laptop to integrate 3DTV play software for 3D Blu-ray playback, gaming and photos.” The XPS 15 also offers an option for a WLED (1920-by-1080) screen, she said.

Just last week, a Dell insider told me that Dell planned to postpone its XPS announcements from February 20 to March 15–or even later–due to “the problems with Intel’s chips.”

But things can change fast in laptop land. In the announcement released through Menchaca’s blog on Tuesday, he also alluded to chipset snares, but he strongly suggested that Dell has found workarounds.

“[One] thing to make clear is that all configurations of the new XPS 15 and 17 feature updated hardware from Intel that is not affected by the chipset issue,” he wrote.

Menchaca linked his blog to earlier reports detailing Intel’s plans for a mid-February release of new chips to replace Intel 6 Series (“Cougar Point”)– a chipset supporting Sandy Bridge — in mid-February, due to the that can interfere with SATA connectivity between PCs and other devices.

Earlier this month, Menchaca said that the Cougar Point problems hare impacted four already available Dell products – the XPS 8300, Vostro 460, Alienware M17x R3 and Alienware Aurora R3 – along with planned products such as a 3D edition of XPS.

Although Dell’s statements on Tuesday answer a lot of questions, they raise some more. However, more clarification about Intel chipsets and 3D options for XPS laptops will undoubtedly emerge from Dell as future days unfold.

In delivering a roadmap of LG’s TV plans for 2011 today, Tim Alessi, LG’s director of new product development for home electronics, listed “more content to watch”  – together with connectivity to home networks and easier-to-use 3D TV – as the three key linchpins for the year ahead.

Beyond announcing 31 new TVs from LG, Alessi cited an expansion of LG’s existing partnership with Netflix and impending pacts with Web services like Vudu, YouTube and Amazon Watch Instantly for Web-based content that will flow to TVs.

At another press conference just minutes later, Netgear announced four new home routers capable of delivering streaming video through Wi-Fi wireless networks or Powerline-enabled electrical wiring to tablets and other gadgets throughout a house.

An hour or two later, Netgear and Verizon unveiled a “4G Mobile Broadband” router for bridging video-enabled home networks and smartphones connected to Verizon’s new 4G LTE mobile network.

Intel, for its part, rolled out dozens of new devices from PC partners–including all-in-one PCs, netbooks and tablets–to be built around its highly graphics- and video-capable new Sandy Bridge chip architecture.

Consumers will use the Sandy Bridge devices to both view and create multimedia content, predicted Mooly Eden, head of Intel’s PC Client Group, at another CES Press Day event.

It’s a myth that consumers don’t want to create, according to Eden. “People like to be innovators” he said.

“It’s in our blood. It’s what we like to do.” On New Year’s Day alone, PC users uploaded 750 million of theit own photos just to FaceBook, Eden noted.

The Sandy Bridge-enabled devices will also come with “Intel Insider” a new capability for secure (ie, copy-protected) delivery of just released HD and 3D movies to PCs.

Warner Brothers, Fox and Best Buy’s CinemaNow Web-based content delivery system have already signed on, with many more “Intel Insider” partners–including movie production house Dreamworks–said to be following later this year.