Heuer has now become a household name - albeit under different ownership than founded it, namely TAG Heuer, which took over in the mid-1980s.  But the watch here - a crisp orange-dialed Heuer Ref. 980.011 on its original rubber Heuer Tropic dive strap (with Heuer buckle) - is no ordinary TAG, which in the years since the mid-1980s has had some...questionable design choices.
 
The Heuer Ref. 980 diver here represents old-school Heuer design, in a smaller-sized package.  1980's TAG Heuer divers, in particular divers like this one, are not common in any condition, and for good reason - they represent a bygone era for Heuer. 
 
Given the parlous state of the Swiss watchmaking industry in the early 1980s, it likely made sense to TAG Heuer to eek out as many model variants as possible using as few unique parts as possible.  TAG Heuer managed to scale down all the elements of its highly popular 980 dive watch series - produced beginning in 1979 through 1982 - to make a stunning dive watch, never an easy feat.
 
The attention to detail and quality is remarkable, and seems more of an achievement with these smaller Heuer cases. Heuer built these divers to high standards, and rendered these waterproof to 200m – just like their elder siblings.
 
Per Hodinkee in "Why The Heuer Diver Professional Deserves A Lot More Credit Than It Gets," "Its stunning success was unexpected and came at the best possible time for the company.  In Jack Heuer’s own words: 'We could not imagine that this model would be the very watch that was to help the company recover.'  Surprisingly, this glorious hero was not a chronograph – hell, most of the time it's powered by a quartz movement.  So let's settle this injustice and look at a relatively obscure diving watch, despite it being a bestseller from 1979 to this very day.  This is the Heuer Diver Professional."
 
For a brief history of these amazing Heuer divers, we turn to another Hodinkee article, “A Personal Note: Marking Time With A Humble Heuer” - “In 1980, Heuer decided it was time to build a proper dive watch.  Sure, years earlier, it had fitted its 'Automotive-Aviation' Autavia chronograph with a diving bezel, but the brand was largely focused on motorsports watches, which is where it had built its reputation."
 
But in the late 1970s, as Jack Heuer tells it in his autobiography, “The Times Of My Life (2013),” Heuer was at a sporting goods trade show in Europe and was approached by a diving equipment company having trouble finding quality dive watches.  Before that fateful show, Heuer was not doing well as a company and its situation had begun deteriorating as early as late 1974 (along with most of the Swiss watchmaking industry, badly hit by the quartz crisis caused by Seiko).  Quartz watches were more technically advanced than mechanical watches, and at a lower price point too, making them fierce competitors for the traditional Swiss companies. 
 
It is in this grim context Jack Heuer saw an opportunity at that 1979 sporting goods trade show. Heuer got the idea to address a recurrent complaint voiced regarding the difficulty in finding reliable private label watches for underwater sports – Heuer’s expertise at this time was racing chronographs, but it took the challenge regardless, and teamed up with French supplier G. Monnin.
 
Per Heuer, “To our great surprise our new diving watches were very well received by the market."  So much so, in fact, that the following year Heuer began offering the Diver Professional in four different sizes and a multitude of dial configurations

This Heuer diver comes on its original rubber Heuer Tropic dive strap, and with nylon strap, spring bar tool, and rugged travel case.