Chap runs Windows 95 on Android Wear Enfant terrible Corbin Davenport, a 16 year-old coder who has in the past ported Minecraft to Samsung Gear and Doom to Android Wear has pulled off another stunt: getting Windows 95 to run on the wearable device. Davenport's had to speed up the video of Windows 95 booting by 25 times in order to make the film below palatable. …
How do you think people who are able to make the really useful things learn? It sure isn't through playing by the rules, and doing only that which others deem "useful".
I always thought the best way to learn how something works is to try to get it to do things it isn't supposed to do. Don't limit others just because it doesn't fit your pitifully narrow world view of how the creative process works.
Why would anyone want to spend time on something like this?
To quote George Mallory, "Because it's there".
Sometimes, the challenge is the most important reason.
It also minds me of my bosses attitude: "No time spent coding is wasted time". Of course he will be pissed off if we delay a project because something we did hasn't worked out, but we will have learned something in doing so.
Why the negativity? Surely many of us here have derived some satisfaction from getting something to work - even if it shouldn't? The end result isn't useful, but the process has been a challenge and has honed his technical skills and perseverance.
You might as well not bother attempting a crossword in a newspaper today - y'know, 'cos it's easier to wait until the paper prints the answers tomorrow.
Of course it's pointless - and THAT is the point. Being able to show it working (badly) just demonstrates capability and possibilities, perhaps just succinctly shows how much computing has progressed in the 20 years since Windows 95. Here are some other things that you might think are meaningless / pointless / have no obvious purpose: Football / Personal Hygiene / Lasers / Politeness / Wasps / Music / Lists like this one
I could think of 10 million more ways to use my time more constructively, the first being a trip to the pub for a pint.
Am I reading this correctly, you're suggesting a 16 year old to go down the pub and have a pint? Maybe you should stop drinking so much, it seems to have destroyed one too many of your brain cells.
"I could think of 10 million more ways to use my time more constructively"
I'm sure you could, but this kid is only 16 years old FFS. His idea of fun is just so different from yours it's on another planet. In a different solar system. In a Galaxy far, far away.
At 16, he's probably more interested in showing off to his friends and saying, "hey, look at this shit. Just like grandad used to have but mine's in a watch instead of a huge beige box"
He says in the captions of the video itself that he's using "... ADosBox which is available on the Play store". So what he's done is load an app onto the watch, then load a Win95 vhd (probably downloaded neat off the internet) onto that, probably using the app's own UI.
Interesting exercise, and points for originality, but hardly the display of virtuoso hacking you're making it out to be. Even for a sixteen year old.
I'm not dissin', just sayin'.
A program (called bochs, I think) allowed Windows to be run on WinMo smartphones. Cripplingly slow, but definitely possible even on the 400Mhz prcessors of the day.
Well done to the kid for thinking of this, but running Windows badly on ARM isn't a new trick.
So what if it's 'just' running on DOSBox? W95 is older than he is and it's a bit of good old fashioned tinkering-for-the-hell-of-it fun.
Then again, I am [very] easily amused - as the other day I RDP'd into my windows 8 work machine from my nexus 7 and showed everyone how I'd got TIFKAM running on Android ;-)
Hey ho!
Posts like this one give me a severe case of old curmudgeon.
Honestly - is it SO hard to write in standard English? Is it necessary to miss out occasional words and punctuation? Do you have to use "teh"?
Sigh.
Kids these days, I dunno, standards slipping...(wanders off disgruntled to the pub...)
"Honestly - is it SO hard to write in standard English? Is it necessary to miss out occasional words and punctuation? Do you have to use "teh"?"
yep
Seriously though, not all keyboards are optimised for full, standard English - think phones, tablets etc..
The whole point of English is communication and so long as you can get your message across intelligibly then what does it matter if a few full stops, capital letters or words are missing?
@Rabbit80 - because if you don't use proper English then you're not communicating *properly*?
As the book title so neatly put it - "Eats Shoots & Leaves" (a Panda) is rather different from "Eats, Shoots, & Leaves" (a murderer in a restaurant).
(Ok, I admit it, I'm an old git too).
I think Windows NT would be even worse as a touch screen OS. Maybe more stable than 9x, but no USB support, ever.
As a side note, we have some very clever young teen programmers in our Robotics Explorers program at work. I worked on one of the laptops we'd given them and found some beautifully written utilities that they'd crafted. Naturally someone had decided to change the desktop background to something unusual, in this case, a Windows ME splash screen. They got it back with an OS2/Warp splash screen in its place :)
I once talked to a guy who was running Win95 on a 25MHz 386SX with only 2MB of RAM. (Yes, I know the sysreqs said 4MB, and he knew it, too.) It was apparently a bit slow starting up, but once up, it would stay up and do whatever trivial task he had for it, but it made my software have to have a special timeout adjustment...
Sounds like what we did to a manager who complained that he didn't have an up to date PC even though we knew that he never used it or powered it up. We had a spare old 386DX knocking about onto which one of my colleagues at the time managed to squeeze Windows 98SE! We then installed it and waited to see what happened. (For the record, it booted but it was veeeeeeeeeeery slow!)
Suffice to say that he never even noticed!
"Sounds like what we did to a manager who complained that he didn't have an up to date PC "
Ah, but in my case, he knew very well that it was ridiculously slow, but it was capable of doing some small task (no I don't remember what it was) stuck off in a corner somewhere. He even set it up on purpose...
He worked at a client of the AV firm (that shall remain nameless) that I worked for at the time, and I had to talk to him when I released a new rev of the Win95 on-access scanner that included a timeout while something else happened. The machine was so slow that the process timed out. Fortunately, the timeout was adjustable, so he went away happy because he could stretch it to be long enough.
-1 for failing to mention Windows for Pen Computing.
I had my hands on an actual, working (not prototype or POC) Windows tablet 20 (TWENTY) years ago.
I forget the full specs, but it was a horrific, hefty slab of a thing with a 20 MB (yes 20, yes MEGAbyte) flash drive in a PCMCIA form factor. The monochrome LCD display was so poorly lit that never mind using it outdoors, even using it indoors it was advisable to draw the curtains and dim the house lights.
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