Smartwatches might, for the most part, be completely worthless, but that hasn’t stopped us from being inured with the concept. Like a character out of Fallout, some people just really want a computer on their wrist. It’s why they have 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 a wrist computer out of a Raspberry Pi and and then put Windows 98 on it. He got the concept from those 80s and 90s wrist 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.
image: 314Reactor
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 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!