Some real-time clocks written in Liberty BASIC

Many mechanical clocks were tried in the past. They settled on a circular display with pointer hands. This is quickly read after a bit of practice. More recently digital displays have become so ubiquitous that young people are not used to analogue clock-hands. Or they expect devices to speak the time, and set alarms by voice recognition.

Digital clocks have used filament, neon or LED bulbs, Nixie tubes, Dekatron tubes, LCD screens, stepper motors- and computer screens.......

Nixie tube displays

Analogue clock with hands

Electro-luminescent display tube

Seven-segment displays

A 24-hour ( but otherwise traditional) clock

An unusual discrete LED clock

And a binary clock from Anatoly..

Further possibilities

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A whole range of historical devices are also modellable on-screen on a computer. I am going to try an egg-timer-style water clock;

a pendulum display ( already done this); a burning candle; .... lots of interesting coding to animate these!

Liberty BASIC code of all the above examples was used to make an animated GIF of ten seconds of operation. Code is available as a zip file. You'll need to unzip to a folder, and also create an empty folder called '10SavedFrames' to house saved images at one second intervals- otherwise 'rem out' the bit that does the saving.