Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

A chap named Nick Lee has managed to run Windows 95 on his Apple Watch. We say “run”, and not installed, because he's had to emulate it. As Lee explains the Apple Watch packs a 520Mhz processor, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage, specs that put many a PC to shame when Windows 95 launched back in 1995. Of course Windows 95 just …

[Mpeler]

Curious Results

"As the video below shows, the results are curious, rather than producing anything usable."

Sounds like Windows 1 0...

Paris: "Now where did that hour go???"

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Re: Curious Results

Not like it was doing anything useful before...

[PNGuinn]

Not like it was doing anything useful before...

Did you mean w95 or the watch?

[Stoneshop]

Re: Not like it was doing anything useful before...

Did you mean w95 or the watch?

Yes.

[Matt Bryant]

Re: PNGuinn Re: Not like it was doing anything useful before...

"...w95 or the watch?" The watch, obviously. It's a measure of just how pointless the Apple Watch is that a user would waste time trying to emulate a completely different OS on it. It also speaks volumes of the waste of resources the Apple Watch is - 512MB of RAM and all it can do is act as a poor header to an iPhone!?!?! Then again, he may just have wanted what all Apple users ends wanting - a decent set of tools running on his Apple device (AKA MS Office).

[FrankAlphaXII]

Re: Curious Results

>>Sounds like Windows 1 0...

Sounds like Windows up until NT 4 really.

[Antonymous Coward]

Re: Curious Results

>>It takes an hour to boot...

Sounds like he's faithfully recreated every nuance

[Ole Juul]

an hour to load

That qualifies as a time machine right there.

[JeffyPoooh]

"...520Mhz processor..."

MHz

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

My first computer had something like 4 or 8 MHz or so (Intel 8088) CPU; my first "Windows 95" computer had a blazing 100MHz CPU (AMD 486 DX4-100).

[JWLong]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

My first computer I had was a Z80 at 4MHZ with 64k of memory and 4 - 8" floppies.

Even had Basic Run Time.

I even got HoneyWell Mod 400 OS to run on it with a little kick in the coding.

[JeffyPoooh]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

JWLong "...Z80 at 4MHZ..."

You've missed the central point of this '520Mhz' subthread.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

> My first computer I had was a Z80 at 4MHZ with 64k of memory and 4 - 8" floppies.

Floppies? FLOPPIES? Youths today don't know they're born. In my day we had to make do with a 300-baud casette interface and 1K RAM.

(I can't remember how fast the processor was on the Nascom 1 but I doubt whether it was as fast as 4MHz..)

[Ian 55]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

1K RAM?? I had 128 bytes and thought myself lucky...

None of this poncy cassette storage, neither, unless you were prepared to pay more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

5.2x10⁸s^-1

:P

[jonathanb]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

I installed Windows 95 on an IBM/Cyrix 166+ running at 133MHz with 16MB RAM back in the day. That was a reasonably high-end spec.

[Danny 14]

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

Mhz is mega heinz? 520M beans per second? That will be some serious gas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Conflicted

On the one hand, i see this as a totally pointless device that the owner was dumb to buy in the first place, being compounded by using for something even more pointless and wasting a whole bunch of time to do it.

But... only the other hand, running a non-touch obsolete OS on touch only device, which while sounds like the definition of pointless, is actually more useful than the Apple watch was to start with....

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Conflicted

From the tone of your post I have to ask this very simple question

"Have you ever thought to yourself 'what if...'?"

If you haven't than I feel sorry for you.

This inquiring mind sort of thing has resulted in a good few discoveries that we rely upon every day.

What if ... back in the pre-stone age, a man or a woman picked up a bit of broken flint and thought 'I wonder if that could help me skin that animal a bit quicker?'

In any event, what are you doing on a Tech (sic) site?

[Roq D. Kasba]

Re: Conflicted

Pointless. Long live pointlessness!

Experimentation and trying dumb stuff creates the wealth of knowledge our society is built upon. The guy who heated up the funny coloured rock to be rewarded with copper was probably just heating up some rocks to find out what would happen.

Curiosity and tinkering have given us a huge advantage over the other species we share this spinning ball with. You either accept the world around you as static and perfect, or you play with it and advance the cannon of knowledge. Now I know it can run W95, it might inspire a new use case, or make me tempted to attempt to install a decent antivirus product...

[Stoneshop]

Re: Conflicted

Pointless

A blunt pencil is pointless, but little else is if you look at it the right way.

[Blofeld's Cat]

Re: Conflicted

"This inquiring mind sort of thing has resulted in a good few discoveries that we rely upon every day."

Quite so, and I suspect most of those discoveries did not start with somebody leaping out of a bath and shouting "eureka", but with phrases like: "That's strange", "How do I make it do that again?", "What happens if ... ?" and "I wonder why it did that?"

[PNGuinn]

"This inquiring mind sort of thing has resulted in a good few discoveries ..."

I've often wondered why the guy leapt out of that bath like that......

[Stoneshop]

Re: "This inquiring mind sort of thing has resulted in a good few discoveries ..."

I've often wondered why the guy leapt out of that bath like that......

Because his prankster of a nephew had augmented it with a freshly charged electric eel.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "This inquiring mind sort of thing has resulted in a good few discoveries ..."

"I've often wondered why the guy leapt out of that bath like that......"

He discovered the piranha.

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Conflicted

> "That's strange", "How do I make it do that again?", "What happens if ... ?" and "I wonder why it did that?"

You forgot: "Where are my hands?", "Why am I blind now?", "Why am I bleeding to death?"

[BlackKnight(markb)]

Re: Conflicted

I thought they usually followed the phrase. "here hold my beer and watch this."

in any case something was discovered.

[Ian 55]

Re: Conflicted

"Why do I turn green when really cross?"

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Conflicted

Don't forget the traditional one.

"Whoops"

[werdsmith]

An Exercise

A physical exercise such as repeatedly lifting a weight in a gym could be seen as pointless, but it has an effect of the physical condition.

Being able to understand and overcome problems when trying to achieve something is a useful skill and such an exercise as this will only enhance those skills.

I like to tinker and make stuff work, but as soon as it works I move onto something else. The benefit of all that tinkering pays off in my day job.

[frank ly]

This is strangely admirable

Like an abstract work of art.

[hypernovasoftware]

You have to admit. This is uber geeky.

[Winkypop]

Like the Apple watch...

Cool, but ultimately pointless.

[Voland's right hand]

Re: Like the Apple watch...

Not your cup of tea, not my cup of tea either, but we are probably not into the M from BDSM. Though there are probably elements of B and S here too.

[Oengus]

"Some men see things as they are and ask why I dream things that never were and ask why not."

Windows 95 on an Apple watch may be pointless but what possibilities does it open up?

[Dan 55]

IIRC, blue screens and IRQ conflicts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 95 on an Apple watch may be pointless but what possibilities does it open up?

Exactly! This is like home computing reboot/round two. Personal Computers by default even smaller than a smartphone! Just as we're beginning to understand the Genome.

[Havin_it]

>what possibilities does it open up?

Office 97, obv. Duh.

[redpawn]

How well does it run Doom?

Might be worth the boot time if you have a jeweler's loop for playing the old games.

[John 104]

Re: How well does it run Doom?

You can run Doom! on it, but you'll have to use gestures as control inputs. So, if you see some guy running around flailing his left arm while simultaneously trying to read his watch face, you'll know what he is up to.

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Still more useful.

[Darryl]

Re: ...

I agree. This might be the first time since 1995 that Windows 95 actually made something more useful (or should that be less useless?)

[Francis Boyle]

He could at least

have put a shortcut to the clock in startup.

[Dz]

Re: He could at least

Judging by the speed of it that probably would have been a 5 hour job though. :(

[Dr. G. Freeman]

I wonder if you could put a Linux/ RaspPi distro on it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today is International "No Title" Day*

The lengths some people will go to, just to play Minesweeper.

*Well, it COULD be, who knows........

[Captain Badmouth]

I am minded to suggest that some El Reg commentards wouldn't need a machine to keep their watch awake. :)

Mines the one with a copy of Left Hand Magic in the pocket.

Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, I learned to use a mouse left-handed because the cable wasn't long enough for the mouse to reach to the right-hand side of my desk. That's why. Honest, guv!

[Z80]

I'd have liked to have had an idea of how long each operation took in real time. Maybe he could have placed a real watch in the frame.

[Mage]

Win 3.0 in real mode

DOS and Win 3.0 too easy?

I did manage to run "Beneath a Steel Sky" on my Nokia E65 about 8 years ago. It wasn't too slow, just tended to have problems, but it did also on PC.

[razorfishsl]

He needs to drop back to windows 3.1, it should boot in under 45 minutes....

[Doctor Syntax]

Running slow. Not what you want in a watch.

[Anonymous Coward]

wrg,idts

[Ryan Kendall]

Apple users want Windows OS

I always chuckle when i see articles about running Windows on an Apple device.

Apple users want the Windows OS, but Windows users never want Apple OS.

Shock Horror

[dajames]

Re: Apple users want Windows OS

Apple users want the Windows OS, but Windows users never want Apple OS.

So how do you explain the Hackintosh project?

In any case: Microsoft will sell a copy of Windows to anyone who wants it, regardless of whether it will run, but Apple don't really want you running their OS on anyone else's hardware, and never have.

[Spudley]

Slightly more sensible than the guy who installed Gentoo Linux on his Tesla.

(More info here in case you haven't seen it already)

[Cyberspice]

So I ran Windows 95 on an Acorn RISC PC in 1995. That had a slower processor and far less memory.

[mr_splodge]

Emulators have overhead sure, but you'd think half a gigahertz of cpu and half a gig of ram would run it faster than that. It must be running on a couple of MHz of clock cycles at the most to be that slow. Windows 95 was supposed to be able to run on a 386!

[applebyJedi]

an hour?

An hour to load Windows 95 wasn't that uncommon back in the day anyway!

[Anonymous Coward]

We've gone full circle...

...when your watch pops the BSOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm

a watch that winds the user up - useful!