Over 30 years ago if you told someone that you were choosing an Apple over a PC you’d probably get a very strange look. But times have changed and today Apple are the manufacturer of choice for anyone who loves their tech. Of course some people would still like the idea of turning the clock back and running retro software on the latest cutting edge technology.
Good examples of this are the people paying NES emulators on their smartphones – or the XBox Live Arcade where people could play Sonic The Hedgehog, Streets of Rage and other classic games. Or maybe you’d be more interested in the Facebook developer who placed Doom on his Apple Watch!
But a man called Nick Lee has gone one step further. Not content with emulating classic gaming, he decided to run a classic piece of computing history on his Apple Watch – Windows 95.
Why Put Windows 95 on Your Wrist?
As Nick explained, the hardware on the Apple Watch puts the top of the range desktop PC’s from the mid-90’s to shame. The 520MHz processor is about twenty-five times faster than the processor in PC’s of the time and no PC’s had anything close to 512MB of memory. So Nick was confident that he could get his retro-OS fix on his wrist by running Windows 95 on his favourite wrist watch.
Nick mentioned that Windows 95 isn’t the first retro OS he has ran on his wrist watch. He previously ran Mac OS 7.5.5 on his watch – although this was not a fully functional version of the OS. This version of Windows 95 is fully functional (although we’ll come to how well it works later) and fully interactive. The “how” he did it is long and complicated – but the good news is… if you want Windows 95 on your wrist… you can get Windows 95 on your wrist! As long as you use an X86 emulator called the Bochs emulator.
How Well Does Windows 95 Work on Your Wrist?
If you want an OS which is incredibly user friendly and quick to boot up, then the smartwatch version of Windows 95 is not for you! It takes about one hour to boot up Windows 95 on the Apple Watch – which meant that Nick had to build a machine which jiggled the watch’s crown to stop it falling asleep (pictured above – committed, isn’t he?)
Once it starts running… well, let’s just say that 30 year old operating systems were not built with the practicalities of a small touch screen in mind. While the built in Apple Watch software would certainly not be suitable for running Windows 95, Nick managed to make a few changes which allows it work quite well. After messing about a little with the watch’s software he altered the settings so they could track a single fingertip. This allows him to move the mouse pointer where he wants it to go by tapping the screen.
Even though it is a little slow and it appears as though it doesn’t appear to be all that user friendly – it works! As you can see in the YouTube video, the result is a pretty functional version of Windows 95 indeed. It’s pretty amazing that a system which required a huge tower full of the latest cutting edge technology can be ran on a tiny little wrist watch today.
