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Chap runs Windows 95 on Android Wear

At last: a touch OS UI worse than Windows 8's

Enfant terrible Corbin Davenport, a 16 year-old coder who has in the past ported Minecraft to Samsung Gear and Doom to Android Wear has pulled off another stunt: getting Windows 95 to run on the wearable device.

Davenport's had to speed up the video of Windows 95 booting by 25 times in order to make the film below palatable. Given there's an ARM-based quad-core Qualcomm system-on-a-chip running inside the Wear – and Windows 95 could be run on a 386 DX – there's clearly some exotic re-platforming action going on to slow things down.

Once Windows 95 gets running, it's clearly rather unhappy about its new home as it produces numerous errors. The GUI is also more-or-less useless on the Wear's minuscule touch screen.

The experience of Windows 95 on the Android Wear may be rubbish, but kudos to Davenport for getting it working: if nothing else he has proven Microsoft has produced a worse touch OS than Windows 8*. ®

*Yes, your correspondent does know that Windows 95 was not a touch OS. And yes, I do recall the tablet version of XP, which probably deserves a retrospective.

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