Video of 20-Year-Old Mac Operating System Running on an Apple Watch

[laurim]

Indeed, none of this was shot particularly well. I'd prefer it be shot closer and in landscape to conform to the shape of the OS.



Obtrusive - noticeable or prominent in an unwelcome or intrusive manner. The letter-boxing is large, surrounds the video, and is unwelcome by most viewers. My use of the word was apposite. The video player's limitation should be taken into account by the person filming; that's why I said designers should understand their mediums.

I agree, your alterations brought nothing to my viewing ease. The original video wasn't shot in landscape, which would've been preferable. As for getting my money's worth out of my monitor, this is solely a fixation you've attributed to me. I don't know why.

I doubt the person who shot this is a designer so your entire premise isn't very apt. This person simply filmed something to share it with the rest of us and instead of being grateful, people here with black bar issues had to whine about how it was filmed and claim that movies should NEVER be filmed in portrait which is totally untrue as I commonly design movies for display on vertical LED walls and Times Square is awash with all sorts of shapes and sizes of movies. Needing everything filmed in landscape is just an artificial requirement for certain people. Like you said, the magnification of the subject was the important factor for viewability, NOT whether the final movie was tall or wide. More tabletop in the frame doesn't help ANYONE see what's going on.

I mentioned getting your money's worth out of your monitor because that is a common statement by people who complain about letterboxing on movies that are filmed in wide format. The same people who make channels like HBO ruin movies by cropping them to fill tv screens.

 

[AngerDanger]

I doubt the person who shot this is a designer so your entire premise isn't very apt. This person simply filmed something to share it with the rest of us and instead of being grateful, people here with black bar issues had to whine about how it was filmed and claim that movies should NEVER be filmed in portrait

My entire premise does not hang on the person who shot this being a designer; it doesn't take a designer to simply hold a device sideways. Black bar issues? It's a simple matter of preference. If you choose to incorporate black boxes on both sides of your creations, that's fine, but it's not something people tend to like.

which is totally untrue as I commonly design movies for display on vertical LED walls and Times Square is awash with all sorts of shapes and sizes of movies.

And your employers would be irritated if you produced a landscape video for a vertical display.

As another person already stated, viewing the original video on an iPhone or iPad is perfectly formatted. Needing everything filmed in landscape is just an artificial requirement for certain people. Like you said, the magnification of the subject was the important factor for viewability, NOT whether the final movie was tall or wide. More tabletop in the frame doesn't help ANYONE see what's going on.

So half of the time people are viewing it on a mobile device, it was perfectly formatted. It's like leaving a toilet seat up in a public area because one presumes it'll be handy one fourth of the time. All mobile devices can play video in either orientation, but not all computers can. Like I said, it's a landscape OS. Both getting closer and shooting it in landscape would help.

 

[laurim]

Like I said, it's a landscape OS. Both getting closer and shooting it in landscape would help.

I don't understand your "it's a landscape OS" comment at all. Are you suggesting the person zoom all the way into the old OS on the screen so the watch is totally out of view? That's kind of like saying a carrot on a plate happens to be horizontal so that dictates how a photographer should photograph the entire meal. I could understand if the OS screen was on its side and complaining about that but I'm mystified why a small part of the movie has to dictate the format of the entire thing. It's important to see it is running on the watch so for me, the optimum framing would be exactly the shape of the watch face as large as possible in the player with nothing distracting on either side, which for you could mean a lot of onerous black space on either side, lol. To each their own. This person probably filmed it to simply show it to his friends and putting it on YouTube was an afterthought, hence the less than optimum formatting for YouTube. OR, he's not as anal as some people about technical demonstration videos.

 

[AngerDanger]

I don't understand your "it's a landscape OS" comment at all. Are you suggesting the person zoom all the way into the old OS on the screen so the watch is totally out of view? That's kind of like saying a carrot on a plate happens to be horizontal so that dictates how a photographer should photograph the entire meal. I could understand if the OS screen was on its side and complaining about that but I'm mystified why a small part of the movie has to dictate the format of the entire thing. It's important to see it is running on the watch so for me, the optimum framing would be exactly the shape of the watch face as large as possible in the player with nothing distracting on either side, which for you could mean a lot of onerous black space on either side, lol. To each their own.

No, I'm suggesting that they shoot and landscape and zoom in pretty close so that the OS can be seen in as much detail as the rather shoddy camera or compression allows. Framing the watch is necessary, but—actually, you pretty much nailed it. Emphasis should be on the watch face without unnecessary watchband on the top and bottom and black on both sides. I'd find a continuation of the table less distracting than letter-boxing, but, as you said, to each their own.

 

[Macyourdayy]

I needed at least a 1GB, so I could have 2 systems and 1 backup, 7.6.1 and 8.1, and a photoshop scratch! v1.0.9!

There's never really enough. I remember 80gig(@$200) being a good buy. I think I might have battled with 2 systems on a used 250M for a while. Ugh. Ahh, 8.1. The good old days

 

[lizardofwoz]

Am I a bad person to find this to be a pointless waste of time? Just my humble opinion.. why do people do this? Run haggy old OS on new devices and announce it? Yes, software is much more efficient today and hardware is minimalistic compared to 20 years back. Also, bears crap in the woods. So? Please feel free to join in and bash my existence if you disagree.

You are a bad person
Surely the important point here is that a 20 year old operating system will still run on a current Apple device? Try doing that with Windows!

 

[ColdShadow]

Waste of time..

 

[iMacC2D]

Removed.

 

[mazz0]

I don't see the point of forcing it landscape just because you feel like you are getting your money's worth out of your monitor by using all the pixels all the time. I bet you are one of those people who can't stand movies in cinematic width because it leaves black bars top and bottom. The important part of shooting web video is getting the right subject matter in view and if the object is tall and skinny it is stupid to shoot it landscape and cut most of the subject off. Now if the person had been able to zoom way into the watch face and it still be in focus then YES, landscape would have been great. Whether the movie filled your view screen is irrelevant. You look at content all day that is vertically oriented and think nothing of it so why have an issue with movies?

What should this person have done without a zoom lens, create a video that's almost all tabletop or make us look at the watch laying sideways and make us turn our heads 90 degrees to read what's on the little screen?

P.S. He keeps touching the digital crown to keep the watch face awake while it boots up.

Actually I think a preferable solution would have been to cut the straps off the video and go a little closer, assuming whatever he's filming on would focus that close.

 

[Menopause]

You are a bad person
Surely the important point here is that a 20 year old operating system will still run on a current Apple device? Try doing that with Windows!

Well, to be fair, it's not running per se, it's emulating. With an emulator I can run Android apps on my Mac and have Steve (God bless his soul) roll over in his grave.

 

[Menopause]

I disagree, but let me give you my opinion:

This is the same as the "Go swimming with it, pour ketchup and syrup on it, hit it with a frying pan video" that appeared when the Watch first was delivered.

Let's see what this thing is capable of, and we can just know that we're using a subset of what it can do. From the video I mentioned, I know that my watch can be dropped, should I forget to take it off when swimming, it'll be OK. For this, I know that other O/S can be loaded on it, and should I want to (chances are small - I stopped jailbreaking when I put my credit cards on my iPhone - Risk is undetermined, and should it be leaked, the consequences are catastrophic, financially), and for me, it is interesting.

See? Just a different point of view, no criticizing.

Agree completely!

 

[kdarling]

Seemed to take a long time to boot. And then it didn't seem like you could interact with it.

Here's the same thing running on a Samsung Gear Android Wear watch, except it's faster, the screen stays on, and you can use your finger as the mouse:

Oh yeah. And it's filmed in landscape

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Am I a bad person to find this to be a pointless waste of time? Just my humble opinion.. why do people do this? Run haggy old OS on new devices and announce it? Yes, software is much more efficient today and hardware is minimalistic compared to 20 years back. Also, bears crap in the woods. So? Please feel free to join in and bash my existence if you disagree.

You are indeed a bad person, but this is actually a pretty uninteresting example of emulation. It's smoke and mirrors because it's on a watch.

A modern ARM SoC emulating a PowerPC G1 is not very interesting in itself and would never have made news, but this is on a watch.

The only thing noteworthy is this is probably the smallest screen that's ever run a full desktop OS. So the novel thing here is how small and good display technology is now.

 

[dysamoria]

I'm overly underwhelmed. It's slower to draw than original hardware and totally useless. It's mildly amusing.

Someone said that software is more efficient today... :-D hah hah hah hah hah hah hah :-D !!!

 

[laurim]

Actually I think a preferable solution would have been to cut the straps off the video and go a little closer, assuming whatever he's filming on would focus that close.

It's hard to know what limitations there were on his setup and whether it was possible to get any closer. The view was very still so he obviously had the phone on something to clamp it down and that may have limited how close the phone could get to the watch and still operate the watch to get it to boot up.

 

[laurim]

Seemed to take a long time to boot. And then it didn't seem like you could interact with it.

Here's the same thing running on a Samsung Gear Android Wear watch, except it's faster, the screen stays on, and you can use your finger as the mouse:

Oh yeah. And it's filmed in landscape

I was too distracted by the tiny black bars on either side of the movie and the fact that the watch face was at an angle

 

[mazz0]

I was too distracted by the tiny black bars on either side of the movie and the fact that the watch face was at an angle

That is a much better video though, in my opinion.

 

[laurim]

That is a much better video though, in my opinion.

Of course it was, it was done by a person with editing software and a different level of camera skills. I was being facetious because the whole judging thing was stupid and unnecessary. People knee-jerk complaining about vertical videos because they heard someone once legitimately say it and think they are being clever repeating it EVERY time they see a vertical video.

 

[mazz0]

Of course it was, it was done by a person with editing software and a different level of camera skills. I was being facetious because the whole judging thing was stupid and unnecessary. People knee-jerk complaining about vertical videos because they heard someone once legitimately say it and think they are being clever repeating it EVERY time they see a vertical video.

How do you know the don't genuinely dislike it?

 

[laurim]

How do you know the don't genuinely dislike it?

I don't want to get into this all over again but suffice it to say, showing more tabletop by turning the phone would not have helped anyone see what was going on in the video so the fact that it is a portrait video is a silly nitpick by people thinking they are clever for commenting on it. If people had complained that the video wasn't as close to the watch face as it could have been, THAT would have been a valid criticism because it affects how well we can see what's going on. And that could have still happened in a portrait orientation since the watch face is in a portrait orientation (funny how no one has a problem with that). To get annoyed or distracted over black bars is silly in my opinion, especially for a video like this which is just an amateur technical video to show that trick. In my business, I routinely have to explain to people that the change they want me to make, "enlarge this photo to fill the screen" for example, won't buy them anything because the photo is already as big as it can get in one direction or important things will get cut off if I crop to force it to fill. People generally don't understand things like aspect ratio and how enlarging in one direction also means the other direction has to get bigger too and maybe that won't get them what they think it will.

Haters gonna hate and I guess they had nothing interesting to say about the actual subject of the video.

 

[mazz0]

I don't want to get into this all over again but suffice it to say, showing more tabletop by turning the phone would not have helped anyone see what was going on in the video so the fact that it is a portrait video is a silly nitpick by people thinking they are clever for commenting on it. If people had complained that the video wasn't as close to the watch face as it could have been, THAT would have been a valid criticism because it affects how well we can see what's going on. And that could have still happened in a portrait orientation since the watch face is in a portrait orientation (funny how no one has a problem with that). To get annoyed or distracted over black bars is silly in my opinion, especially for a video like this which is just an amateur technical video to show that trick. In my business, I routinely have to explain to people that the change they want me to make, "enlarge this photo to fill the screen" for example, won't buy them anything because the photo is already as big as it can get in one direction or important things will get cut off if I crop to force it to fill. People generally don't understand things like aspect ratio and how enlarging in one direction also means the other direction has to get bigger too and maybe that won't get them what they think it will.

Haters gonna hate and I guess they had nothing interesting to say about the actual subject of the video.

I think that's rather arrogant and presumptuous of you. You're basically saying you don't see their point, therefore obviously they don't have one and they're just being pretentious. I think it's possible they just don't share your taste.

 

[RedTomato]

:: Puts my flameproof pants on ::

The video fitted my iPad screen perfectly because I usually hold it in portrait when reading websites like Macrumors. It would also have worked perfectly had I been using my iPhone, where I have the same habits.

If I wanted to ignite more flames, I'd also say apple has sold far more iDevices than laptops or desktops, and people are increasingly using these devices for web browsing, not standard screens.

I'll leave you with some facts. My colleagues routinely make videos that go on both Facebook and YouTube. The Facebook videos get over 10k views, and the same video on YouTube gets a couple of hundred views. The Facebook videos in portrait get far more views than the landscape videos.

We think it's because people browse Facebook more on their devices in portrait form rather than on standard screens or devices in landscape. Of course there are lots of other factors that come into play so we can't say for certain.

Nevertheless, the world is changing, whether us IT old guard like it or not. I don't particularly like FaceBook, but I accept it's amazing in some ways and has had a massive impact on society in general.

 

[mazz0]

:: Puts my flameproof pants on ::

The video fitted my iPad screen perfectly because I usually hold it in portrait when reading websites like Macrumors. It would also have worked perfectly had I been using my iPhone, where I have the same habits.

If I wanted to ignite more flames, I'd also say apple has sold far more iDevices than laptops or desktops, and people are increasingly using these devices for web browsing, not standard screens.

I'll leave you with some facts. My colleagues routinely make videos that go on both Facebook and YouTube. The Facebook videos get over 10k views, and the same video on YouTube gets a couple of hundred views. The Facebook videos in portrait get far more views than the landscape videos.

We think it's because people browse Facebook more on their devices in portrait form rather than on standard screens or devices in landscape. Of course there are lots of other factors that come into play so we can't say for certain.

Nevertheless, the world is changing, whether us IT old guard like it or not. I don't particularly like FaceBook, but I accept it's amazing in some ways and has had a massive impact on society in general.

I hope you haven't got the impression I feel strongly about the portrait video thing. Yeah, I don't like it, but I really don't think it's important. I'm sure (OK, I'm not, but you know what I mean) the guy saying "portrait video - always wrong" means it in a lighthearted way too.

Also, I disagree with the *always* wrong part (can't remember if I always disagreed with it or if I've changed my mind part way through the thread). I think in situations where being able to clearly see the top and bottom of a portrait orientated object is critical, then portrait video is best. Examples: a single person tap dancing on the spot; a promotional image of a vase spinning on a display stand. This would be true of the watch if the straps were absolutely key to the content of the video (which they weren't).

I don't think this is just about what we're used to, I think it's about what our species is used to. Personally I find absorbing a video (really taking it in) works best when it occupies the full focused part of my vision, which is landscape. Same reason I want a big TV. I suspect science would back me up on this. I could be wrong though, perhaps it is just personal experience and I'll get used to it.

When you talk about your Facebook videos, are you saying you can see stats for the same video saying whether it was viewed in landscape or portrait, or are you saying when you post videos in portrait they get more views than ones you post in landscape?

If the former, that's weird - surely whatever you think of landscape vs portrait video, you'll turn your device to view it the right way, rather than peer at a shrunken version of it? My parents often forget to do so, but you'd think young adaptable minds would quickly cotton on the the benefits of that.

If the latter we shouldn't infer that this is because they prefer portrait video - it could be that the content most likely to be shot in portrait mode is the more popular type of content, for example. If people are actually choosing to avoid landscape videos in favour of portrait, based solely on the video orientation, I can't for the life of me imagine why that would be. I'd be surprised if your friend is mainly posting videos that do suit portrait video. Is it a page about vases, or tap dancing?

 

[ajscilingo]

As an entire computer that fits on our wrists, the Apple Watch already seems like something out of a science fiction novel, but a new video from software developer Nick Lee demonstrates just how far computing has come in the last two decades.

Lee's hacked an Apple Watch running watchOS 2 to run a port of a 20-year-old Macintosh OS, System 7.5.5, using the Mini vMac Macintosh emulator.

When System 7.5.5 was released in 1996, it required a full PowerPC-based Mac to run, and in their smallest incarnation, those machines were clunky, heavy, and pretty far from the portable devices that we have now. Today, that same operating system can run on a tiny 38mm to 42mm wrist-worn computer.

Article Link: Video of 20-Year-Old Mac Operating System Running on an Apple Watch

System 7.5.5 worked on 68000 machines as well, in fact vMac emulates the 68k Processor not the PowerPC, so that's what we're seeing here on this watch. Mac OS didn't drop 68k support entirely until Mac OS 8.5, even 8.1 still ran on 68040 chips.

 

[bobesch]

Seemed to take a long time to boot. And then it didn't seem like you could interact with it.
Here's the same thing running on a Samsung Gear Android Wear watch, except it's faster, the screen stays on, and you can use your finger as the mouse:

Oh yeah. And it's filmed in landscape

Wow, both proof-of-concepts do look great!

But this developement has already been foreseen by some clever mind long before
and he gives the right answers about additional equipment!