Give smartwatches another 10 years, and maybe they’ll play Crysis. But at least they can run Windows 95 for now. By sideloading a DOS emulator onto Samsung’s Gear Live , YouTube user Corbin Davenport managed to get Windows 95 running on Android Wear. It doesn’t run particularly well, taking a few minutes to boot and running out of RAM when launching applications. But if you’re booting up Windows 95 on a smartwatch, chances are you’re doing it for kicks rather than some practical purpose.
These days only a masochist would use Windows 95, which first came out in August 1995. But running it on a smartwatch? Now that’s just insane. Still, YouTube user Corbin Davenport managed to do exactly that, running Windows 95 on his Samsung Gear Live. The resulting user experience, which can be seen in the YouTube video above, is quite atrocious, but we have to admit that Windows 95 is running pretty fast on the smartwatch — at least until it ran out of RAM, which happened after Davenport tried to open any app on the system. The device is not actually running Windows 95 as an operating system; rather, it is running a DOS emulator called aDosBox, which is then used to run Win95. ADosBox is available for Android devices for free. This is not the first time Davenport has managed to run an ancient piece of software on his smartwatch. A week ago, he published a video (below) showing the Samsung Gear Live running the 1993 game DOOM.