Watch Mac OS 7.5.5 Running On An Apple Watch

Nick Lee, a dedicated programmer with access to WatchOS 2.0, has ported Mac OS 7.5.5 to his wrist. That’s right: the OS you used in the 1990s to make your ‘zine can now boot – albeit slowly – on your Apple Watch. He used Mini VMac, an “early Mac emulator,” and recompiled it for the Watch.

Can the Watch actually run these sorts of programs well? Sure. The Watch’s S1 chip is roughly equivalent to the iPhone 4S’s A5 chip which, as we well know, is plenty fast.

“MacOS System 7.5.x shipped on ~100MHz PowerPC chips with ~24MB of RAM, a bit higher in the later models. So the Watch most certainly has more processing power,” wrote Hacker News user MBurns.

It’s an amazing hack and quite fun to see that bit of Mac OS nostalgia booting up on a lozenge of electronics about as big as the Return key on a 1991-era Power Mac. Now if we can just get the Apple Watch to run Doom…