Now You Can Put Windows 98 on Your Wrist

Smartwatches might, for the most part, be completely worthless, but that hasn’t stopped us from being injured with the concept. Like a character out of Fallout, some people just really want a computer on their wrist. It’s why they’ve shoved Windows 95 onto an Android Wear watch and MacOS 7.5.5 onto an Apple one. Yet Redditor Lord of Bone went even further.

As he explained in a Raspberry Pi Reddit thread, the intrepid inventor built the wrist computer out of a Raspberry Pi and then put Windows 98 on it. He got the concept from those 80s and 90s wrists mounted computers in sci-fi TV shows, as well as the fun of having what was at one point in time a massive box sitting on his wrist.

“[The inspiration was partly] to have something that was once state-of-the-art and needed a huge behemoth beige box now sitting on my wrist running on an ARM CPU,” he explained to Gizmodo in a Reddit message.

The “smartwatch” runs on a Raspberry Pi A+ and is operated via the touchscreen and 5 buttons mounted to the top of the device (you can see them at the top of the image above). According to Lord_of_Bone, it’s not exactly an enjoyable experience, and everything runs at a crawl—though it probably runs better than a real 80s wrist computer like the Seiko UC-2000.

 

And it’s arguably more attractive than the myriad of other wrist computers we’ve seen. Like this ugly Futurama rip-off, or the version in an even uglier white, or the Fallout Pip-Boy. It’s also definitely better than that Toshiba number that looked sort of like Dick Tracy’s watch.

Details for making the Windows 98 wrist apparatus can be found on Lord_of_Bone’s website. His next plan is to attempt to get Doom running on the wrist-puter. “[The] flying Windows screensaver runs at about 0.5 fps so Doom I imagine will be 0.1 fps,” he said. Good luck with that.