Nothing demonstrates a more interesting quirk in the history of bad user interface design than the calculator watch, which required cramming the largest number of buttons into the smallest space. So quirky are they that there is a certain nostalgia, for their distinctive styling, both for the collectible ones from the 70s and their mainstream counterparts from the early 80s.

Sometimes, making things simpler makes things more complicated. Like telling the time on willfully minimalist watches. Watches can be minimalist and functional, but the examples here put form over function where the aesthetic gain may be questionable. There is one of these we actually really like, but we are not telling which.

People sometimes make fun of the Swiss, since all they are famous for inventing is the Cuckoo Clock. Which is not really fair, because they didnt - the Germans did. Here are some post modern alternatives (both intentional and accidental) to the classic Black Forest Cuckoo Clock.

Atomic clocks are accurate to within one second since the period in time when humans and apes diverged. These clocks are literally what makes modern civilization tick, but few people ever see one. Their accuracy is necessary to overcome potential errors caused by relativistic effects in GPS satellites, for example. Here is a gallery of some of the more interesting atomic clocks. Vote for your faves.

An Alarm clock is one of those gadgets that is simple enough to warrant a thousand different design variants. Here are the ones we consider most innovative or fun.Be awoken by a muezzin or a drill sargent and switch off by feeding money, doing a puzzle, diffusing a bomb, stepping on scales or grabbing a swinging pendant. We've included everything here except the Clocky, which you can see on a hundred thousand other blogs. Vote for your faves.

The earliest wrist watches were made for soldiers, where fumbling around for a pocket watch was dangerous. The very earliest examples were from the Boer War, however the idea caught on in the first World War.Some of these watches were actually designed to be worn around the leg (for airmen), and many have the distinctive protective grille that gives them a medieval look.

Really complicated, and really expensive swiss watches are called grand complications based upon strict criteria.These are often based upon the gravity compensating tourbillon mechanism that isn't strictly needed for a wristwatch but is insanely complicated so people build them to show off their skills as watchmakers.This is the kind of gadget that gazillionaires with enough taste to avoid diamond encrusted ones buy when they fly into Geneva. They look very James Bond - except that they cost ten times as much as his humble Rolex or Omega, often costing more than $100,000 each.