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The Best Apple Watch App Is Windows 95

Say goodbye to your warranties, this is retrofitting at its finest.

The Silicon-valley mantra of "innovation at all costs" can have its perks, but it often means abandoning things which were already great—like Windows 95. Indeed, it might be the fact that this monument to perfection was so wantonly cast aside by its creators in favor of a newer, not-quite-as-good version of the same thing that explains the trend in retrofitting today's latest technology to run this particular '90s-era operating system.

The latest in a long list of modern devices running this ancient software is brought to us by Nick Lee, who recently installed Windows 95 on his Apple watch.

As Lee details in a blog post, the Apple Watch has a lot of computing power crammed into a small amount of space: a 520 MHz processor and 512 MB of memory. It's processor alone is 25-times faster than the popular 386 processor that was probably powering your PC two decades ago, and 512 MB was the size of many computers' hard drives when Windows 95 was released—their memory capacities were even smaller.

Given the far superior computing power of his wristwatch, Lee wrote that he "was confident" that it was capable of running Windows 95. I won't get too into the weeds about just how he did it, but essentially Lee used Apple's WatchKit (an app developing tool) to patch a different app that allowed him to emulate Windows 95 on the watch. If you want all the details to try it for yourself, Lee gives step-by-step instructions here and has posted the code to GitHub.