Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video] | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

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105 pointserickhill35 comments

I didn't make a video but I did something similar ^^ https://twitter.com/Sephiroth87/status/608460838467420162

I knew the Apple watch was useful for something.

Aw. Apple Watch looks a lot like the Watch icon (shown when the system was busy) in the original MacOS.

Now if someone can figure out how to do pointing on a tiny screen, it might work. Maybe you wave you arm around in space and the accelerometers drive the cursor.

Now here's a thought. Wear two devices, one for the screen and one for pointing. Move the other hand around to move the cursor. Or track the other hand when some distance from the screen when you need a cursor smaller than your thumb.

We're going to need that technology soon, so you can do stuff while wearing VR goggles. So downsize it to the wrist.

Get NeXTSTEP 3.3 and Interface Builder running on the Watch and I'll be really impressed.

My second favorite computer to write (my main job), to this day, is still a Powerbook 1400c running System 7. It uses a G3 upgrae so it's very fast/responsive, as that OS would run just fine on even a 040 processor.

I'd have to say my favorite computer ever was the Power Mac G4 867MHz running 8.6 (or was it 9.1?). Basically Mac OS 8-9 just ran obscenely fast on PowerPCs as it was essentially in maintenance mode while they built OSX, so we got years of little more than stability patches and cosmetic changes without bloat while Apple's hardware was overtaking Wintel (temporarily). Heck you could run the entire OS and applications off RAM Disk and still have plenty of RAM left over.

Aside: the 1400 was a great model (especially after the 5300 debacle) and had an upgradeable CPU daughtercard (ah back when the engineers were running the asylum). The big problem with it was lack of space for RAM, so when you did upgrade the CPU you had a kind of fast but cramped machine.

You're right: my 1400 maxes out at some 64 megs or Ram. More than enough for writing/text editing, but too little for anything else. The keyboard is awesome by the way.

I also replaced the hard drive with a fast pcmcia compact flash card, made it even more responsive.

There was also a G4 upgrade for the Powermac 9500 series that was compatible with System 7.

Nice to see OS 7.5.5 on a Retina display.

In theory Apple Watch has the processing power for significantly > OS 7

http://www.cultofmac.com/320279/how-powerful-is-the-apple-wa...

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.

The real problem is emulating PPC -> ARM, which is a very slow process, and why the boot time is so long in the video.

For the record, my Performa 6116CD which shipped with 7.5 had a 60 MHZ PPC 601 and 8 MB RAM. It could run on significantly less than that as well - in fact I believe it ran as far back as on some 80s machines.

Yup. I had an LC520 (25 MHz 030--not that far back from your 6116) that ran 7.5.x.

7.5.5 was the last version that ran on the Mac Plus, SE, Classic, and various other 8MHz 68000 Macs.

Right but it ran System 7.0.x.

System 7.5 had OpenDoc, so it ran in two modes: fast, light, and stable, OR with OpenDoc.

Not to mention the classic MacOS of that era had considerable amounts of code still written in 68k assembly, so a lot of what you're seeing is actually being emulated as 68k -> PPC -> ARM.

I think I saw "mini vmac" come up, so I believe this is emulating a 68000 directly, not with an extra layer in the middle.

Processing power is not only frequency and memory. Different instruction sets might show drastically different performance. Processor cache might be higher on old computer (or might not, of course). Memory bandwidth or latency might differ too. I remember reading comparison between 1990 mainframe and current intel server. Mainframe has much higher memory bandwidth and performed much faster on tasks where processor cache was insufficient.

It's emulating a Mac Plus.

My understanding is that it is an A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance. It all depends on the performance of the emulator, because OS 7 is not compiled for ARM.

> A5 processor that is tuned for battery life, at the cost of performance

It probably also has quite severe temperature scaling.

I wonder why? After all, it's directly attached to a huge heatsink with a sophisticated liquid cooling setup that ensures it will stay at a comfortable 37C -- it will even do evaporative cooling when necessary, going so far as to replenish the liquid reservoir on its own.

That sounds... uncomfortable. Seriously.

Imagine the marketing: "and it uses YOUR body as its cooling system"!

I just wish it would use my body as an energy source. Battery low? Eat a hamburger!

Get ready for 3XL iBands for your iWatch.

Over the weekend i saw an HN article about an x86 compiler written to compile using only MOV commands, after it was proven that x86 MOV is Turing Complete. I was sure this would be the most impressive waste of technology efforts i would see for a long time.

I was wrong. It lasted 3 days.

What you call useless other people call brilliant. I was at RECon this past weekend and one of the coolest talks was about compiling malware using only MOV. Good luck reversing that.

https://recon.cx/2015/schedule/events/55.html

You still have to make system/library calls to do anything evil. You can obfuscate the logic, sure, but it's still easy to tell where important things are happening.

One day I should finish my CP/M emulator for an MSP430 microcontroller with 2kB of ram (swapping out to external storage to emulate the CP/M 64kB address space). I got it up to the point of providing a login prompt --- it'd boot in about 10-15 seconds. You could type on it via a external PC/XT keyboard (bitbanged through the GPIO pins!), but I never got the screen to work, or any proper mass storage for disk. (The 8080 architecture is surprisingly elegant and orthogonal. The Z80's a bit of a mess by comparison.)

...what? Why are you looking at me like that?

It's just a screen sharing, no?

not necessarily. The video description says it's watchOS 2 which allow native apps to run on the watch. Also the current WatchKit remote UI thing would not allow the kind of access to the screen that is seen in this video.

LOL, now I really want to get an Apple Watch!

I'm more interested in how the uploader got a verified Youtube account, especially with <20 subs and 3 videos.

Is this the same as https://www.youtube.com/verify ? I've just verified my account, but I have no uploaded videos to test with.

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