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Developer Installs Windows 95 On An Apple Watch (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Developer Nick Lee has successfully installed Windows 95 on his Apple Watch. It works, but it runs very slow. For example, it takes about an hour for the OS to boot up. In a blog post, Lee points out the Apple Watch features specs capable of running the old OS. To get Windows 95 running on the Apple Watch, Lee had to modify Apple's development software in "rather unorthodox ways" that allowed him to turn the OS into a Watch app, which also emulates an environment for the OS to run on, he tells The Verge. To deal with the fact that Apple Watch's screen is always turning itself off when not in use, he set up a motorized tube that constantly turns the Watch's crown, preventing it from falling asleep. In addition, Lee altered the Watch's software to let Windows 95 track a single fingertip, hence the constant swiping in his video.
Anyone else remember this guy? Ancient UNIX on a nintendo gameboy.
C|N>K
For example, it takes about an hour for the OS to boot up.
Man, I thought my PC had bad boot times.
That sounds about normal to me. Time to defrag the hard disk and do a fresh reinstall of Windows.
Despite hating both windows 95 and the apple watch. This is some awesome hackery.
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An hour to boot up Windows? What's the boot time if you disable Norton?
judging from the comments the core audience is long gone and the readers are just strays from Reddit
There was a day when doing something purely for enjoyment, the sake of doing it and just seeing if it could be done were lauded
On today's Slashdot such things are derided and despised
If he given the work to actually write a JIT x86 to ARM translator, but the project is mostly a "i compiled Qemu to X and became news" so, not expecting that anytime soon.
I would have thought that the continuous stream of "Update to Windows 10" nag popups would keep the display alive.
Have gnu, will travel.
Tons of people would still only be what, a couple of dozen people? Supposing that most of them are well fed westerners.
important news to anyone.
I love this. If we get important news, we get a bunch of whiners complaining it's not nerdy enough. Now we have undeniably something which is news for only the mose dyed in the wool nerds and well, you know the rest.
So yes, this is slashdot for heaven's sake. This is precisely the sort of story which should be here (along with others).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I can't be the only one who thinks that it's funny that he managed to run the most over hyped desktop OS of its time on the most over hyped wearable gadget of its time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have no idea what emulator he's using, but it gets the prize for slowest x86 emulator of the year. Windows 95 is *lightweight* compared to anything modern, even under an emulator.
Let's see, quick test here. Samsung Chromebook, which is a dual-core Cortex-A15 (ARMv7) at 1.7GHz. Let's set cpufreq cap to 500MHz (Apple Watch is 520MHz). Install Win95 on a PC under QEMU, copy it over to the Chromebook, compile QEMU (for some reason it's not in the Arch Linux ARM repo...), and boot it up.
Boot time, from qemu launch to desktop and no "hourglass" cursor? 90 seconds. Emulating a PC on a 500MHz ARMv7.
Okay, so the Apple watch probably uses a lighter weight core than the Cortex-A15 on the Chromebook, but still, that doesn't anywhere near account for this kind of discrepancy. Oh, and QEMU is actually emulating a full 64-bit CPU (which of course Win95 doesn't need).