Harrison Ford wears a Microma LCD Digital

Rick Deckard hunts replicants through a 2019 Los Angeles of acid rain, Japanese neon, and flying cars. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Harrison Ford plays the burned-out cop pulled back in to retire a handful of escaped artificial humans built by the Tyrell Corporation. On his wrist he wears a cheap digital watch: a Microma, its black case and floating LCD numbers about as far from a luxury timepiece as a watch could get.

Microma is a strange thing to find in a science-fiction classic. The brand was Intel's one venture into consumer products. The chipmaker bought the watch company in 1972, sold LCD digitals under the Microma name for a few years, lost money on them, and got out of the watch business by 1978. So the watch on the wrist of Blade Runner's hero, in a film about the near future, came from a company that no longer existed when the cameras rolled. In 1982 cheap quartz and digital watches were busy dismantling the Swiss industry, and Deckard's Microma is one of them.