The Meaning of 'Hack': "Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
I think this story at Medium qualifies: I installed Windows 95 on my Apple Watch:
With a 520 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, the Apple Watch packs a lot of computing horsepower into a very small package. On paper, its processor alone is about twenty-five times faster than the average 386, and 512 MB was the size of a hard drive in the mid nineties, not memory. As a result, I was feeling confident that the Apple Watch had the ability to run one of the most revered desktop operating systems Redmond has ever produced.
I was born in the nineties, and the first personal computer my family bought (a $3000 screamer with a 300 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB of RAM, and the optional Boston Acoustics speaker system) ran Windows 95. Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve installed an old operating system on a watch. Here’s a video of my Apple Watch running Mac OS 7.5.5.
Sure enough, there's a picture of a Windows 95 desktop on the Apple watch's screen! The story goes on to give some details as to the steps and problems involved in getting it installed and running. The author notes "Due to the fact that it is emulated (not virtualized), it takes about an hour to boot." Which can be problematic as the watch would go into sleep mode during bootup. Ever resourceful and employing the best in automation technology, there is this note in the procedures: "* Optional: hot glue a motor to the watch's crown to keep it from falling asleep." And, yes, there is a picture of that, too!
[Update:] I just found his 5-minute time-lapse video of the Apple watch booting Windows 95 as well as his patient and persistent attempt to navigate the UI and launch a program on it.
What's next? Emulating an Apple ][?
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:04AM
I'm impressed, IMHO this truly qualifies as hacking. In both the positive and negative sense of the term.
He manages to "hack" the watch to run win95, which is impressive in that it does show his ability to know a system intimately enough to get it do his will without the blessing of Jobs & Co. He also manages to "hack" in the negative since, because he's managed to install windows, thereby installing malware on the poor thing.
I guess you really can have your cake and eat it to.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 30 2016, @02:06PM
In a way, from the perspective of what you are ALLOWED to do with these devices, running Windows 95 on it is rather ironic.
Windows 95 was very open to developers and users. Anyone could develop any kind of software they liked for Windows 95. Even the 95 internals wouldn't stop developers from poking around at hardware directly. Your software didn't have to get magic approval from some clown at a big company just so your users could run it. And it was almost fully backwards compatible with DOS and Windows 3.1 if you needed to continue development for those environments (and many did).
On the other hand, Apple stuff. Locked down. And doing what you want with it makes you an evil hacker that risks getting thrown in jail.
What a world.
BTW - Happily posted from Windows 95 using: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8.1.25pre) Gecko/20110912 SeaMonkey/1.1.20pre Firefox
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @09:46PM
8-) With a 9x system connected to the Internet, I'm wondering how often you prophylactically scrape the drive clean and restore from backup.
...and how much of your resources are dedicated to the band-aids pasted all over the OS.
.
Yeah, this guy's hack is of some note--kinda like climbing to the top of a snow-covered mountain (where no one can actually live).
When I saw this in the queue, I thought
"OK, he has the OS running.
Now, what is the -app- that he needs to run which only works under 9x and is useful when running on a teeny tiny screen?"
No answers in TFA.
Any ideas on that from someone who still has a retro system running?
.
I'll also note that by the time 9x was first released, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and SuSE were all available--and those had actual innate security e.g. they didn't run as root (as 9x did--or, in your case, does).
GNU/Linux Distro Timeline (1.9MB - 6682px x 2020px) [futurist.se]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:55PM
To be fair, I'm not sure there is much in the way of live malware bothering to target Win95 any more. It's like fly-fishing for coelacanth. WinXP? Sure you're gonna get pwned, it's just modern enough that there are millions of lusers still running it for whatever reason, but who the hell is going to be sniffing out unpatched '95 machines? It might just be the safest OS to run on the internet.
(Score: 1) by tedd on Monday May 02 2016, @03:55AM
Are you advocating security through obscurity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:41AM
Let's see an Apple Watch run System 7.5, a real Mac OS, not OSX. Basilisk II can emulate an m68k Macintosh for you.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:48AM
That was easy.
Mac OS 7.5.5 on Apple Watch [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:53AM
Hmm. Nick Lee, and Nick Lee. I wonder if they're related somehow?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @12:04PM
From TFA:
Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve installed an old operating system on a watch. Here’s a video of my Apple Watch running Mac OS 7.5.5
(Score: 4, Funny) by Nuke on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:52AM
Just why oh why oh why? Windows 98 was much better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:59AM
Plug-n-Play was greatly improved in Win98, but with emulated hardware it doesn't matter as much. Funny thing is last year when I tried emulating a bunch of Win9x with QEMU, WinME was actually less crash prone than Win98.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:28PM
Go for Win98 SE ... support for USB flash drives!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:53AM
Newer versions of the Apple Watch and Samsung/Huawei/LG/Pebble/Fitbit/whatever equivalents will be released. But when does it get good?
Major leaps in technology would be needed to make the health and fitness features any good without it actually pricking you and testing your blood directly.
Aside from being more present and a couple seconds quicker to access than a phone, the smartwatch is inferior to the phone, mostly due to the tiny screen. It doesn't have a clear advantage like smartglasses might have (augmented reality overlay and eye-level camera).
What the smartwatch really needs is a holographic projection display. I wonder how many of Apple's billions would be required to push that on the world.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by MostCynical on Saturday April 30 2016, @11:54AM
First they convince you to wear ... a watch.
Then they convince you that you also need the hat/glasses/feedback underwear.
Next, you're some flavour* of Borg (g**gle, msoft, apple, whatever)
The OS wars will be nothing on the assimilation wars.
*yes, I spell like a non-USAian, as I be not one.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @09:42PM
Not non-USAian or not USAian.
And why is google spelt differently oitside US?
Finally english spakers should not be apologising to the colonies for spelling propre.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday May 01 2016, @12:14PM
Funny, I don't see anyone else giving a fig whether you (or anyone else) uses American or British spellings... *rolls eyes*
Seriously, if you're going to go down the primary-school road of altering names, you might as well go all-out and replace the 'S' with a dollar sign — though you could really impress people with your worldly maturity by using "AmeriKKKan" with a nice little footnote of "not to be confused with 'American' which is not restricted to one overly-powerful country."
Just going with the drippy "USAian" ends up conjuring mental images of a sulky little kid, arms crossed & pouting with resentment at the kids next door. Not exactly a flattering look for you (or anyone else over the age of 10).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedBear on Saturday April 30 2016, @11:59AM
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me:
There is something that I don't think I will ever fully understand. How in the hell did personal computers proliferate so quickly to tens of millions of people? The original PCs back in the 70s/80s did almost nothing compared to what today's machines are capable of, and did it at a glacial pace, and they cost upwards of $6,500 in 70s/80s money. That's like the price of a nice new car in today's dollars. How could so many middle class families afford and justify spending so much money on a device that could barely run VisiCalc and a couple of simple games? How is it that nearly everyone here, regardless of age, somehow grew up in a house with some kind of PC around to experiment on? I don't get it. Or does this only seem unfathomable because wages for the lower and middle classes have dropped so precipitously since about 1975? I would love to have an explanation of how something so seemingly outrageously expensive ever succeeded in becoming a household commodity.
On topic:
I remember going over to a friend-of-a-friend's house one day in early '95. Somehow this high school kid had access to a prerelease "beta" copy of this new "Windows 95" thing, and he booted it up for us. It had an animated full screen boot screen! Animated! Can you imagine? It took a long time to boot up, much longer than Windows 3.1 ever did, and you could hear that hard drive grinding away the whole time, so you could already tell this new operating system was Serious Bizness[TM]. And then the desktop finally came up. Wooooooowwwwww. It was amazing. It was like staring directly into the future. It was slow as hell, and that hard drive literally never stopped thrashing, but to my young mind I was looking at something stupendous that instantly made Windows 3.1 seem archaic and toyish. I could tell this behemoth was created to take advantage of newer, much faster hardware that would soon be available. I remember being so amazed that this kid somehow had access to this new OS long before it came out in the stores or showed up on new computers. It was probably because his dad was a teacher. Having recently read Stranger in a Strange Land, all I could think to say in response to this experience was, "I am only an egg." Of course, Win95 turned out to be a horrible unstable monstrosity in many ways, but at the time, in that context, it really seemed like something special, and I had a lot of fun with it before Win98 arrived. I still boot it up in a VM now and then just for fun. I can totally understand why it would be fun to try and get it to run on a wristwatch.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:52PM
There were several factors. In the early "personal computer" days, it was mainly hobbyists scraping together parts, boards, and teletypes to use with their Altair or similar machines just so they could have some of that computing power under their own control rather than bowing down to a big company with big iron just for some computing time.
Later, businesses picked up on personal computing. I think few people realize how much information processing was done manually. If you were an accountant, you sat in front of large books and added thing by hand or with a calculator, or you paid out the ying-yang for processing time on a mainframe. Now drop a microcomputer infront of them with VisiCalc and the time saved paid for the cost of the computer in no time. You now had time to actually go home in the evening and see your wife and kids. And on top of that, now you could experiment or play around with all those number without paying for computing time.
Between those two, average people started wanting computers at home. The business people like being able to do some of their computing work from home. The hobbyists were already pushing for this. And people realized that going forward these machines could help them learn how to develop products for the future, so people bought the less expensive microcomputers for their kids.
It was a wonderful time of learning, positive change, and true innovation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @09:53PM
That's all you really needed to say.
Personal computers took off after MBA-types realized that they could change a value in a spreadsheet and instantly see the effect.
...and if you look around, you'll see what those dudes' ability to effortlessly squeeze out another $0.001 from every widget has gotten us. 8-(
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:28PM
The cost of many pre-IBM-PC 70's PC's was in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands, so were very affordable. Putting BASIC in read-only memory (ROM), using an audio cassette-tape recorder for nonvolatile storage, and using a TV set for display, made for low-cost machines. The original 1981 IBM-PC minimal configuration (no hard drive and no floppy drives) could be used this way. By the late 70's floppy-disk drives were cheap enough to use in these machines. The original 1984 Macintosh had one floppy drive and no harddrive; the entire MacOS was in ROM. SomeGuy has well-covered the excitement of the 70's machines in another comment here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Saturday April 30 2016, @08:07PM
"There is something that I don't think I will ever fully understand. How in the hell did personal computers proliferate so quickly to tens of millions of people? The original PCs back in the 70s/80s did almost nothing compared to what today's machines are capable of, and did it at a glacial pace, and they cost upwards of $6,500 in 70s/80s money."
I think you could understand it with a little guidance from your elder. When I was a kid in the 70's, the marketers were telling the parents that an understanding of computers was going to be the difference between those who would be able to find employment in "the future" (meaning the 80's, 90's and 21st century), and those who would wind up being Soylent Green (or at best not getting any share of whatever prosperity was going to be available in the coming dystopia). Consequently, by the 80's parents who had enough money to give their children an edge were purchasing whatever sort of personal computer they could afford, and desperately hoping that their children would understand it better than they could. Maybe it would somehow help little Johnny get a better grade in math or science and not wind up living in a card board box in the alley. It was entirely believable after the late 70's recessions. They could buy it on a credit card and their kids would pay them back later, when they became engineers, astronauts, and doctors (My parents couldn't afford one. I stayed away from computers until I was well into my 30's, about the time Windows 95 was just coming out.)
Also, consider you can't compare early PC's with what we have now. To see them from the perspective of someone who had never seen them before, you have to compare them to what we had then; mechanical typewriters, with liquid paper to correct, pencils and paper, abaci, and slide rules, practically stone knives and bear skins (google that together with Mr. Spock). In 1975, at the age of twelve, I saw a simple electronic 4-function calculator, $75 in 1975 dollars. I immediately recognized that it would be a huge improvement over the drudgery of doing arithmetic on paper. And as for doing research, try going to the library to look things up in books. From my house the library was a half a tank of precious gasoline away. Before google, and before we were aware of the internet , any computerized lookup of information saved enormous time and effort. Early PC's were often bundled with encyclopedic software that promised to make research easy. (No not as easy as Googling it, but a huge leap compared to spending all evening in the library.)
(Score: 1) by letssee on Saturday April 30 2016, @08:38PM
Our first PC (an XT machine , i.e. an 8086, the origin of the x86 line) cous about 1500 (dutch) guilders I think. (equivalent to about 3000 today's dollars) paid in half by my father's employer because he needed it for his work. We had a (fast) 16MHz machine with 1MB ram and a 80 MB harddisk, which was state of the art at the time. A cheaper option, with 512k ram and 40MB disk running at 8MHz cost about half of that I think.
This machine sounds incredibly unusably slow. And it would be if it had to run today's software. But at the time I could play a flightsimulator on it (FS1 probably) and program in basic. Opening the word processor (WP5.1 I think, or maybe WP4 or wordstar, I don't really remember) was basically instananeous. I still can't fathom how it's possible that starting Word/Libreoffice on the computers of today is still slower than running wp5.1 on a machine more than a 1000 times slower.
Probably because HD speeds haven't kept up with processor speeds.
On a sidenote: As a programmer I'm glad I learned my trade back then. Times were a lot simpler for a coder. The DOS 'software stack' was so simple even a 13 year old could understand it reasonably well and keep the complete system 'in his head'. Today if you want to code something you have to accept that 90 percent of what happens, happens in a black box where you have no clue how it works.
The moral of the story is: the first computers were expensive , but not *that* expensive if you had some support from work (or bought the cheaper model). And they were slow *compared to our modern machines* but very fast compared to using a typewriter (no editing except for typ-ex, which was basically fast drying white paint which you could type over) or a calculator. or drawing graphs by hand.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @08:54AM
I still can't fathom how it's possible that starting Word/Libreoffice on the computers of today is still slower than running wp5.1 on a machine more than a 1000 times slower.
The problem is that there are people that want-want-want-want but don't have any insight into the effects of all that extra load and abstractions, but they do control what projects that gets the green light. The ease of usage has permitted people that lack the technical intuition to use and program computers and it shows.
A modern computer has a lot of capacity, try something MenuetOS [wikipedia.org] for a change and perhaps the real capacity will be more visible. A 200 MHz Pentium shall boot in 5 seconds with this.
It's all about how many instructions a piece of code uses to get something done. It has been forgotten. And it's a metric that seem invisible currently. People too often complain about slow computers but rarely of slow software practices.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday April 30 2016, @10:00PM
Cheap non-IBM-compatible computers, typically running CP/M, such as the Amiga, Atari, Amstrad and Sinclair, continued to sell to home users for a decade after the IBM PC launch had established the latter as the office standard. Home users only moved to IBM compatible PCs after the clones brought down the price (in real terms) and people wanted the computer at home to be compatible with the one they used in the office, as bosses began to expect them to be able to work at home. Also, it is when games became available for the IBM-compatible PCs.
Not everyone was impressed with Windows 95. Many recognised it straight away as poorly written bloat and complained that they were losing control of their own PCs - a complaint that is around today and even more true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2016, @02:58AM
IIRC in the early '90s, a fairly loaded PC suitable for gaming (but not tricked out for hardcore gaming) from Dell or Gateway cost in the neighborhood of $1400 - $2000. That would be a 486 box with a VESA expansion bus providing a dedicated channel between the CPU and the video card.
Word processing alone made it a solid investment - how would you pull together a resume and cover letters without it? (Yes, cover letters were necessary, and they were almost always sent with the resume via snail mail).
Spreadsheets for the same things people use them today, although now there are online alternatives.
MS Access and its competitors (dBase, Paradox, etc) for information storage for a small business or big personal project.
CD-ROMs with encyclopedias, movie databases, and science tours, the kinds of things that are commonplace on the WWW today. Fun for the whole family.
And of course, games, starting with those from id Software.
Packaged software sold in retail chains was a pretty big business back then - it's not like today when the offerings are pathetic, apart from maybe video games. There was a fair amount of entrepreneurial activity in areas such as desktop publishing, which has pretty much disappeared. People used to spend time browsing the software packages.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @08:50AM
People that had seen AmigaOS would not have been impressed by Windows 95. It's rather a sign of not being aware of things at the time.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday May 01 2016, @09:42AM
Yes, I know. I had hoped that it would be clear from my little anecdote that I was describing it from the perspective of someone who at the time had very little computer experience at all beyond using DOS 3/4/5 and Windows 3.1. I never got to see anything as awesome as AmigaOS, although later on I became a BeOS devotee for a while which I think had a lot of former Amiga users in its community. But I am and was well aware that Windows 95 was a total mess. Installing Win95 from floppy disks was always loads of fun. I say that quite facetiously, of course.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @11:32AM
Any reason why you didn't try Linux or that Berkeley thing?
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday May 01 2016, @01:29PM
Oh, I did. A Debian-based distro called Libranet was a pleasant home for a while. I think I mostly used IceWM on that. Also Mandrake, before it became Mandriva, where I used KDE. I've looked at many Linux distros over the years. I tried the BSDs, but mostly used them for servers. Ultimately I found that I was spending far too much time just getting each new Linux distro or upgrade working (on laptops, with wi-fi), so I went to Win2K for a while and then found OS X, where I've been for around 13 years. It suits me just fine and I think a lot of BeOS refugees ended up on OS X. If the quality/value of Apple's stuff deteriorates so much that I can't stand it anymore I'm planning on escaping to PC-BSD.
But no matter where I go it's going to be a painful transition, for one simple reason that no one ever seems to talk about: Keyboard shortcuts. I got used to using Mac-style keyboard shortcuts (Alt-key based rather than Ctrl-key based) while using BeOS, so moving to OS X felt almost like coming home. But even the specialized Linux distros that go out of their way to pretend to be OS X cannot seem to succeed at properly implementing Mac-style keyboard shortcuts, so using anything besides OS X for very long has become a quite unpleasant experience. My fingers automatically use a dozen or more simple Command-key Mac keyboard shortcuts hundreds of times every day and I simply can't get used to going back to Ctrl-key shortcuts. Always hated them back when I used Win95/98/2K/XP. I was basically a mouse-only person, as many Windows users still are today, until I experienced BeOS.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @01:37PM
On the free Unix side of things you can usually configure software as much as you like. Regarding keyboard vs mouse etc. Keyboard shortcuts is way faster than a mouse. And won't cause "mouse arm" etc as much.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday May 01 2016, @03:06PM
Yes, I know. The *nixes are a tinkerer's dream. I attempted to convert a Linux environment to Mac-style keyboard shortcuts myself many years ago. but when I realized I would have to manually, one by one, convert dozens of different keyboard shortcuts in several different locations or in text-based config files (KDE, GNOME, IceWM, LXDE, GTK, etc.) to get all the different applications I used to even begin to exhibit similar behaviors, and then somehow learn to maintain those changes for every computer I was using and every different desktop environment and different distro I tried, I quickly gave up. I just don't have the patience to be a Linux guru at that level. But if you know of some kind of package I can install that will automatically seek out all the relevant config files and convert a Linux or BSD system to using Mac-style keyboard shortcuts with a single command, I'd love to hear about it. I don't know of anything like that. It seems I am alone in wishing to use the Mac-style keyboard shortcuts I am familiar with on other platforms. One would think that after 15 years someone would have implemented a way to just flip a switch and choose between Windows-style, Unix-style or Mac-style keyboard shortcut setups, but no. It never happened.
What I truly don't understand is why even the developers of the Linux distros, like Pear OS, that purposefully attempt to copy and emulate OS X in every way possible have also failed to implement Mac-style keyboard shortcuts. The simple keyboard shortcuts are part of what makes OS X what it is, so it makes no sense to me that they continue to use the standard Ctrl-key shortcuts as every other Linux distro. It's just weird.
Meanwhile, as an OS X user I haven't had to futz with finding and downloading any drivers of any kind, installing any kernel modules, recompiling any kernels or fixing any keyboard shortcuts in 13 years. For those of us who don't find OS X to be limiting in any way it is quite a pleasant experience. I hope against hope that will never change. I'm certainly glad that Linux and BSD exist for those who like them, but for a thousand different reasons they just never lived up to my expectations for the sort of consistency and convenience I wanted from a daily-use desktop/laptop OS. Fantastic for servers, though.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Monday May 02 2016, @08:02AM
Release configurations files for one or more of those programs and get others to keep them up to date. There's probably others with the same need as yourself.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @08:38AM
Why not run something that actually makes use of all those MIPS? like AmigaOS that could do multitasking, sampled stereo, graphical interface windowing etc all within 256 kB ROM and 256 kB RAM running 1 MIPS (7 MHz 68k). At the same time standard x86 models were sub MIPS processor, bleeps for sound, monochrome display and single task provided you loaded memory correct.
Of course Bloat 3.11 will be slow. It's not efficient and there are way better things. Some even managed these things with an 8-bit processor at 1 MHz with 64 kB RAM. The problem with the clock is that the screen is to small for the eyes to be really useful.
Anyone up for trying AmigaOS or GEOS on this clock? now that ought to be a speed boast over syrup 3.11.95.eXPired or whatever. Bezzzdee would also be nice to test.