Twenty years ago, you’d have to look to science fiction to find watches that let futuristic space travelers and cartoonish detectives talk on their wrists. But even in comic books and movies it would have been difficult to imagine running a full home computer’s operating system on something so small.

Fast-forward to the present and, not only are we using our wrist-based computers to talk to one another, but we can also run operating systems that are more powerful than what was available in the in the mid-90s.

Apple Watch Running Mac OS 7.5.5

Software developer Nick Lee ported a nearly 20-year-old Macintosh operating system into his Apple Watch running WatchOS 2 (which is currently in developer beta). Lee used a build of the older desktop operating system via the Mini vMac emulator.

These sorts of hacks may be silly (it’s not exactly easy to use a classic desktop OS on a 1.5 inch screen), but it’s still impressive to see an OS that was originally designed for a desktop computer running on a tiny watch.

Version 7.5.5 of Mac OS was first released in the fall of 1996. At the time, an operating system that powerful required a large home computer with huge tower. Today, Lee’s demonstration on Apple Watch not only shows the operating system running on something smaller than a matchbox, but also reminds us of just how far things have come in two decades.

Technology advancement marches on… and it is no longer difficult to imagine the sci-fi future that we read about in books.

Via: MacRumors

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

2 replies on “Mac OS 7.5 can run on an Apple Watch”

  1. It’s slower than what I expected. miniVmac used to run fluently on a 3-400MHz single core Nokia N800…

  2. While something like this is totally useless it is still cool. I love that people not only think about doing this stuff, they actually make it work!

Comments are closed.