The Stand (1978)

The Stand

Stephen King's 1978 novel follows the survivors of a superflu that kills nearly everyone in America as they gather around Mother Abagail in Boulder and Randall Flagg in Las Vegas. With every time signal gone, a status-symbol digital watch turns into a small emblem of what ended. (Open Library)

Watches

Hamilton Digital Pulsar

On the road west Lucy Swann wakes at a quarter to midnight by the ladies' Pulsar she wears. She tells Larry Underwood she took the thousand-dollar watch from a jewelry store and that it is no damned good, since everyone's watches have stopped at least once and nothing is left to set them by. Larry calls it the death of capitalism: any lady in America can now have a Pulsar digital and a mink. The text says "Pulsar" and "Pulsar digital" and gives no model.

Source text: All the clocks there must be stopped and I have a thousand-dollar Pulsar watch that I hawked from a jewelry store and it can't keep time down to the solar second like it's supposed to. Because of the flu. The goddamned flu. (Stephen King, The Stand, scan cataloged as Doubleday, 1978, p. 390; the watch is introduced on p. 386; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Hamilton Digital Pulsar

On the winter journey back to Boulder with Tom Cullen, Stu Redman tracks the calendar by his own Pulsar, which puts their night in Avon on December 22. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: According to Stu's Pulsar watch, they stayed the night of December 22 in Avon, and the following morning Stu asked Tom to pack up while he went downtown. (Stephen King, The Stand, scan cataloged as Doubleday, 1978, p. 795; Internet Archive scan OCR)