Developer Nick Lee this evening has shared a video showing how he managed to hack an Apple Watch to run Macintosh OS, System 7.5.5. For those counting, that was released 19 years ago on September 27, 1996. The Apple Watch was released April 24, 2015. That’s a pretty impressive feat by Lee (via MacRumors).
Lee was able to accomplish this with an Apple Watch running watchOS 2 and the Mini vMac Macintosh Emulator. The mini vMac Macintosh Emulator is designed to allow more modern devices run software that was designed for early Macintosh computers. Macintosh OS, System 7.5.5 was designed to run on a PowerPC Mac at the time of release.
You can view the video of System 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch above. Below is a comparison of the sizes of two devices: the system on which System 7.5.5 was designed to run and Apple Watch.
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very useful!
Useful, no, but it is indicative of Moore’s law. Just think about how little power Macs had in 1996 that they are now eclipsed by a watch.
I agree, just kidding. The thing is you can’t actually use MACOS in the watch as you would even in a 1996 Mac
Now, get a PowerMac 5500 to run watchOS 2, and I will be impressed!! :)
This should remind the Geeks in Cupertino that Copy/Paste has not been improved since this computer was new. could it be time for an update?
what needs to be improved about copy and paste? You copy something, and paste it… I don’t think there’s any more to be done with this feature than the current working version.
So Apple Watch is as powerful as an almost 20 year old monolithic computer. Not sure that Cupertino will be using that fact in the next advertisment.
I imagine System 7.5.5 to be a lot more useful than a large percentage of other stuff that will run on an Apple Watch