Reverse-engineering the Web-@nywhere Watch

[ClassicHasClass]

That's a portable, right?

The Web-@nywhere Watch was a primitive smartwatch ca. 2000-1 that purported to surf the web on the 59x16 LCD on your wrist -- if you'd downloaded data to its 93K buffer beforehand which was entirely fetched from the manufacturer's server which had been down since at least 2011, using the proprietary Windows 9x client. By reverse-engineering the serial protocol and the encoding, this watch can now surf the Web again.

Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist

In the halcyon days of analogue modems and POTS dialup Internet, when the only wireless connection in your house was between the cordless ph...

oldvcr.blogspot.com

 

[NeXT]

Oh my...god......

 

[Eudimorphodon]

It’s kind of nuts how other than having 50 times the memory that watch is legitimately worse in almost every way compared to the Seiko UC-2000 from 1985.

 

[Plasma]

Was that screen recycled from a hose timer? Turrible.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

It’s kind of nuts how other than having 50 times the memory that watch is legitimately worse in almost every way compared to the Seiko UC-2000 from 1985.

Absolutely. I think the UC-2000 could have done a credibly better job - backed with more memory, it definitely could have. I'm sure somewhere in this watch was a better watch trying to get out, but I haven't seen it yet.