alt Hacker NewsHuh, 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
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For those that don’t feel like watching a video, it was the Timex Datalink.
Bloomberg terminal authentication (screen-sync) works this way too.
Kids also got a toy based off of Timex Datalink - I had one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8ig2UPjOXQ
... The DSI e-BRAIN is also fully working in timex_datalink_client, which amuses me so: https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client/issues/111
Timex DataLink. I had the Ironman Triathlon branded model of those, used the hell out of it in high school.
The screen flickering trick also only worked on CRTs under Windows 3.1/9x, so if you had a laptop, any other system with a LCD, or were running NT you had to get a special dongle that hooked up to your serial port and would blink a LED that you had to hold in line with the watch's sensor.