In high school I had one of the mechanical "flip" clocks. Then later an LED clock which almost certainly used the LM8560 (a Sony, which lasted far longer than I expected. Back when products were built with quality in mind). And as the article says, the chip depends on the AC frequency (50/60 Hz) to keep accurate time. For the US market, that input was likely hardwired to 60 Hz via a jumper. Japan must have used a switch, given it's mixed 50/60 Hz national power standard.

These days I have an LCD clock that does not use the LM8560 but instead gets it's time from the Radio Data System values embedded in the FM broadcast. Possibly using the Sanyo LC72723 to decode them. The CT (clock Time & Date) data field is accurate to within 100ms according to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System

Then in the late 90's and early 00's you almost got alarm clock at "Dollar Stores" for $15, and for really cheap pocket FM radios, you could get them as prizes with sodas and such, as a marketing scheme, with the soda logo printed in the device.

With no internet, often you were in $REMOTE_FORGOTTEN_RURAL_VILLAGE and the TV antenna didn't have tons of nearly TV repeaters/relays, you would love some FM/AM radio with cool stations reaching over 100 and 200 kms in case of AM ( I remember to listen heavy metal/gothic metal stations from Portugal in Spain within 100 kms from the border ). In Spain, either boring national and international pop radioformula, or soccer past dinner everywhere.

Oh, btw, one thing I hated from these clocks it's having to reset the time because it was misconfigured on a power cut. Nowadays they could just put some firmware and flash it for 0.0001 euros per device, if not less.

I remember how badly these radios would drift off-time when running on the battery backup! He explains in the article about how the back-up oscillator is a simple R-C circuit because the power line reference is absent.

It would also kill the backup battery in a couple of hours. If you're in an area with prolonged, frequent backups it wasn't worth installing the battery. It was only good for occasional, short blackouts of a few seconds or less.

On that note. I tried to make candle replacement out of yellow LEDs in the 1980-years. To read books in de tent. But no matter how many leds I added it just was not enough.

     Being not a programmed micro controller, the LM8560 is also a virtually eternal component. Many modern micro controllers incorporate a flash memory to store the software that let the controller work and execute the desired functions. Flash memories retain their content not for an unlimited lifespan. It may be several decades, but before or later it comes the day when they begin to lose their content, and the micro controller stops to work. This can’t happen to LM8560, because it doesn’t contain any flash memory.

That's a strawman, as the cheapest devices using microcontrollers use mask ROM.

> “Digital” doesn’t mean necessarily “electronic”. It means that the time is show actively by digits and not by hands.

Kind of weird since digitus means finger.